Emotional memory persists longer than event memory

Abstract

The interaction between amygdala-driven and hippocampus-driven activities is expected to explain why emotion enhances episodic memory recognition. However, overwhelming behavioral evidence regarding the emotion-induced enhancement of immediate and delayed episodic memory recognition has not been obtained in humans. We found that the recognition performance for event memory differs from that for emotional memory. Although event recognition deteriorated equally for episodes that were or were not emotionally salient, emotional recognition remained high for only stimuli related to emotional episodes. Recognition performance pertaining to delayed emotional memory is an accurate predictor of the context of past episodes.[Supplemental material is available online at http://www.learnmem.org.]Memories of events evoking strong emotions, especially fear, selectively persist (Bradley et al. 1992;Breslau 2001;Coles and Heimberg 2002;Wagner et al. 2006) because emotion enhances event-memory retention. The hippocampus is crucial in processing declarative and spatial long-term memory, whereas the amygdala drives emotion processing and emotional memory formation (LaBar and Cabeza 2006;Suzuki 2009). Whether or not emotion enhances event memory retention is controversial. By using photographs with affective valence as both encoding and recall stimuli, some authors found that emotion accelerates episodic memory encoding (Bradley et al. 1992;Maratos et al. 2001;Smith et al. 2004Smith et al. , 2005Wagner et al. 2006). However, others speculate that emotion simply heightens the subjective sense of remembering, and that increase in the subjective ratings of vividness, recollection, and belief in accuracy does not indicate accurate memory (Talarico and Rubin 2003;Sharot et al. 2004). Experiments involving commonly used photographs as encoding and recall stimuli permit good control of confounding factors (Maratos et al. 2001) and enable rigid event-emotion coupling, but do not allow the examination of the effects of emotion alone on memory encoding. This is because the acute effects of emotion on memory recognition mask the delayed effects of emotion on memory encoding and may be expressed during memory recognition via the memory consolidation process.Emotional memory may have an independent neural background; the encoding, recognition, and consolidation processes involved in emotional memory may differ from those involved in episodic memory (Cahill et al. 1995;Squire and Alvarez 1995;Adolphs et al. 1997). Amnesic patients with unilateral hippocampal damage can achieve complex emotion-based learning, despite their inability to encode and recall episodic memory (LaBar and LeDoux 1996;Turnbull and Evans 2006). However, amnesic patients with severe bilateral hippocampal damage are incapable of emotion-based learning and episodic memory (Gupta et al. 2009). Different types of memory processes may operate in the formation of emotional episodic memory (Zola-Morgan and Squire 1990; Squire 1992); separate neural systems store memories of emotion...

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