Abstract
Recent animal and human research indicates that stress around the time of encoding enhances long-term memory for emotionally arousing events but neural evidence remains unclear. In the present study we used the ERP old/new effect to investigate brain dynamics underlying the long-term effects of acute pre-encoding stress on memory for emotional and neutral scenes. Participants were exposed either to the Socially Evaluated Cold Pressure Test (SECPT) or a warm water control procedure before viewing 30 unpleasant, 30 neutral and 30 pleasant pictures. Two weeks after encoding, recognition memory was tested using 90 old and 90 new pictures. Emotional pictures were better recognized than neutral pictures in both groups and related to an enhanced centro-parietal ERP old/new difference (400–800 ms) during recognition, which suggests better recollection. Most interestingly, pre-encoding stress exposure specifically increased the ERP old/new-effect for emotional (unpleasant) pictures, but not for neutral pictures. These enhanced ERP/old new differences for emotional (unpleasant) scenes were particularly pronounced for those participants who reported high levels of stress during the SECPT. The results suggest that acute pre-encoding stress specifically strengthens brain signals of emotional memories, substantiating a facilitating role of stress on memory for emotional scenes.
Highlights
Acute stress initiates various bodily adaptation processes to establish physiological homoeostasis and affects cognitive processes such as attention, learning and memory
Exposure to the Socially Evaluated Cold Pressure Test (SECPT) resulted in significantly stronger increases in heart rate (Time6Group, F(2,50) = 4.14, p,.05), systolic (Time6Group, F(2,50) = 69.85, p,.001) and diastolic (Time6Group, F(2,50) = 8.69, p,.01) blood pressure compared to the control group
We examined the influence of acute preencoding stress on brain potentials of long-term memory for emotional and neutral scenes
Summary
Acute stress initiates various bodily adaptation processes to establish physiological homoeostasis and affects cognitive processes such as attention, learning and memory. Payne et al found that pre-encoding psychosocial stress facilitated memory for an emotional story while recognition for the neutral episode was impaired. These discrepant findings for emotional and neutral materials have been discussed to result from differential effects of stress and stress hormones on brain regions involved in either attention or memory control [8]. If stress during encoding facilitates memory consolidation for emotionally arousing events [15] we further expected enhanced recognition and larger ERP old/new effects following acute pre-encoding stress selectively for emotionally arousing pictures. Recognition and brain potentials of neutral pictures, on the other hand, were expected to be unaffected or even impaired [11] by the stress manipulation
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