Emotion, Vol 26(4), Jun 2026, 806-814; doi:10.1037/emo0001607
This study investigated how emotional events—specifically experiences of sadness (vs. happiness)—influence individuals’ mental visualization processes, with a focus on how they alter perceived color chroma in visual imagery. Drawing on emotion regulation theory, we propose that people are more motivated to forget sad experiences than happy ones, and this tendency influences how such events are mentally visualized. Specifically, individuals tend to mentally represent sad events with lower color chroma (i.e., reduced vividness, intensity, or saturation) compared to happy events. Results from three experiments involving 939 participants support our theorization (data collected in 2018–2023). Experiment 1 extends prior research by showing that participants mentally represent sad experiences in lower color chroma than happy experiences. This suggests that the color–emotion association exists not only in stimuli-based processing but also in mental visualization. Experiment 2 identifies the mediating role of the motivation to forget the emotional experience in the causal relationship between emotions and color chroma representation. Experiment 3 further indicates that the effect of emotions on color chroma is mitigated when individuals are explicitly prompted to forget emotional experiences. This research demonstrates the role of motivational processes in shaping mental visualization and provides a novel and verifiable explanation for the association between color chroma and emotions documented in the emotion literature (Pazda et al., 2024). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)