Abstract
Emotional content is known to enhance memory in a content-dependent manner in healthy populations. In middle-aged and older adults, a reduced preference for negative material, or even an enhanced preference for positive material has been observed. This preference seems to be modulated by the emotional arousal that the material evokes. The neuroanatomical basis for emotional memory processes is, however, not well understood in middle-aged and older healthy people. Previous research on local gray matter correlates of emotional memory in older populations has mainly been conducted with patients suffering from various neurodegenerative diseases. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine regional gray matter correlates of immediate free recall and recognition memory of intentionally encoded positive, negative, and emotionally neutral words using voxel-based morphometry (VBM) in a sample of 50-to-79-year-old cognitively intact normal adults. The behavioral analyses yielded a positivity bias in recognition memory, but not in immediate free recall. No associations with memory performance emerged from the region-of-interest (ROI) analyses using amygdalar and hippocampal volumes. Controlling for total intracranial volume, age, and gender, the whole-brain VBM analyses showed statistically significant associations between immediate free recall of negative words and volumes in various frontal regions, between immediate free recall of positive words and cerebellar volume, and between recognition memory of positive words and primary visual cortex volume. The findings indicate that the neural areas subserving memory for emotion-laden information encompass posterior brain areas, including the cerebellum, and that memory for emotion-laden information may be driven by cognitive control functions.
Highlights
The emotional enhancement effect of memory (EEM) entails the augmentation of the formation and strength of memory traces for emotion-laden information [1,2,3]
We examined regional gray matter correlates of immediate free recall and recognition memory of intentionally encoded positive, negative, and emotionally neutral words, respectively, in a larger group of middle-aged and older healthy adults
Recognition memory of both positive and negative words surpassed that of neutral words, and positive words were better recognized than negative words
Summary
The emotional enhancement effect of memory (EEM) entails the augmentation of the formation and strength of memory traces for emotion-laden information [1,2,3]. A negativity bias, indicating a relative preference for negative over positive information, has been commonly observed [8, 11,12,13]. In middle-aged and older adults, the negativity bias has been found to be reduced [13,14], if not replaced by a positivity bias, i.e., a relative preference for positive over negative information [8, 12]. The positivity effect seems to be modulated by arousal, as the age-related valence-specific differences in memory were observed for low-arousing stimuli, but not for high-arousing stimuli [12]. In a recent meta-analysis of 100 studies, Reed et al (2014) showed that it was most likely to be found in studies with wider age comparisons and in studies that did not impose experimental constraints on cognitive processing, such as using intentional encoding instructions as opposed to an incidental encoding paradigm [8]
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