Abstract
The effect of emotional arousal on memory presents a complex pattern with previous studies reporting conflicting results of both improved and reduced memory performance following arousal manipulations. In this study we further tested the effect of negative emotional arousal (NEA) on individual-item recognition and associative recognition of neutral stimuli in healthy participants, and hypothesized that NEA will particularly impair associative memory performance. The current study consists of two experiments; in both, participants studied a list of word-pairs and were then tested for items (items recognition test), and for associations (associative recognition test). In the first experiment, the arousal manipulation was induced by flashing emotionally-negative or neutral pictures between study-pairs while in the second experiment arousal was induced by presenting emotionally-negative or neutral pictures between lists. The results of the two experiments converged and supported an associative memory deficit observed under NEA conditions. We suggest that NEA is associated with an altered ability to bind one stimulus to another as a result of impaired recollection, resulting in poorer associative memory performance. The current study findings may contribute to the understanding of the mechanism underlying memory impairments reported in disorders associated with traumatic stress.
Highlights
Understanding the mechanism underlying the effect of stress on memory carries practical and theoretical considerations, with research in this field have made an important progress by the discovery that glucocorticoids (GCs), stress hormones released from the adrenal cortex, bind to specific receptors in the hippocampus [1], a key region for declarative/episodic memory [2], PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0132405 July 17, 2015Arousal and Associative Memory [3]
Planned comparisons analysis reflected that while no differences between the pre-to-post experimental phase were evident in the control group (Mbefore = 29.13 SD = 6.32, Mafter = 27.66 SD = 5.97, t(14) = 1.50, n.s.) a significant elevation in the State Anxiety Inventory (SAI) levels was observed in the negative emotional arousal (NEA) group (Mbefore = 28.26 SD = 6.57, Mafter = 40.20 SD = 14.55, t(14) = 3.65, p = .000, ηp2 = .41)
The unique design of the current study adds another perspective regarding the effect of arousal on memory, synthesizing often disparate findings from individual studies by testing the effect of NEA on associative, emotionally-neutral, non-autobiographical information
Summary
Understanding the mechanism underlying the effect of stress on memory carries practical and theoretical considerations, with research in this field have made an important progress by the discovery that glucocorticoids (GCs), stress hormones released from the adrenal cortex, bind to specific receptors in the hippocampus [1], a key region for declarative/episodic memory [2], PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0132405 July 17, 2015Arousal and Associative Memory [3]. During familiarity the retrieved information is based on the intensity of the impression that the unit has been previously perceived; while in the case of recollection, an encoded unit is retrieved together with its contextual information (e.g. time and/or place) This distinction, which is supported by numerous cognitive and neuroimaging studies, postulates that recollection involves the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus and parahippocampus which encode and bind (i.e., associate one stimulus with another) relations between components of events [7],[8], [6]. The crucial distinction between recollection and familiarity depends on the presence or absence of contextual associations [9] and can be tested using paradigms that probe memory for items and memory for associations (see [10,11,12,13]). There is a lack of studies testing the effect of NEA on neutral, non-autobiographical memory for items and for associations in healthy as well as in pathological populations
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