Pre-learning stress that is temporally removed from acquisition exerts sex-specific effects on long-term memory

Abstract

We have examined the influence of sex and the perceived emotional nature of learned information on pre-learning stress-induced alterations of long-term memory. Participants submerged their dominant hand in ice cold (stress) or warm (no stress) water for 3min. Thirty minutes later, they studied 30 words, rated the words for their levels of emotional valence and arousal and were then given an immediate free recall test. Twenty-four hours later, participants’ memory for the word list was assessed via delayed free recall and recognition assessments. The resulting memory data were analyzed after categorizing the studied words (i.e., distributing them to “positive-arousing”, “positive-non-arousing”, “negative-arousing”, etc. categories) according to participants’ valence and arousal ratings of the words. The results revealed that participants exhibiting a robust cortisol response to stress exhibited significantly impaired recognition memory for neutral words. More interestingly, however, males displaying a robust cortisol response to stress demonstrated significantly impaired recall, overall, and a marginally significant impairment of overall recognition memory, while females exhibiting a blunted cortisol response to stress demonstrated a marginally significant impairment of overall recognition memory. These findings support the notion that a brief stressor that is temporally separated from learning can exert deleterious effects on long-term memory. However, they also suggest that such effects depend on the sex of the organism, the emotional salience of the learned information and the degree to which stress increases corticosteroid levels.