You can do this with manual shifting, but none of the automatics that I drove had this feature of engine breaking. Although I sometimes hack it with my current automat by flooring the pedal and releasing it right after it shiftet to lower gear.
If you release the accelerator, does it decouple the engine from the wheels?
As the other person mentioned, the quote you are citing means that you shouldn't spin the wheels of an automatic while the engine is not spinning. The input shaft of an automatic transmission typically drives the transmission's lubrication pump. If you spin the output shaft of a transmission of this design without spinning the input shaft, you are rotating the mechanism without lubrication.