How do emotion regulation strategies affect the memory of negative events? To investigate this, we first tested a distraction paradigm where participants were asked to rate their emotional reaction to a set of negative stimuli, followed by a recall test one week later. Indeed, results showed that distraction as an emotion regulation strategy successfully decreased reported negative valence, but also impaired retrieval of negative stimuli. To expand on this, using psychophysiological measures (EDA), we conducted an emotion regulation training study on psychological distancing: participants were instructed to distance themselves psychologically or increase their personal relevance from the stimuli presented to them, while also reporting valence and arousal rates. To test their recognition and source memory we conducted a recognition test 48 hours later. Results showed the differences between increasing and decreasing in reducing perceived negative emotions. Moreover, recognition memory and source memory results highlighted how memory can be affected by cognitive demand tasks, regardless of the direction of regulation. We discuss these results in light of possible connections between cognitive phenomena and clinical considerations.