Estrogen modifies arousal but not memory for emotional events in older women

Abstract

Emotional arousal and the affective content of events influence memory. These effects shift with age such that older people find negative information less arousing and remember proportionately more positive events compared to the young. The emotional enhancement of memory is mediated by medial temporal lobe limbic structures and the prefrontal cortex, which are both affected by sex hormones. We examined whether hormone use (estrogen or estrogen and progesterone) in older women modulated perceptions of valence and arousal, and subsequent memory for emotional images or stories. Their performance was compared to younger women. Hormone use in older women resulted in higher arousal for negative images and stories but memory was not affected. We hypothesize that estrogen modifies the influence of the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex on emotion, but that agerelated changes in the hippocampus prevent the enhancement of emotional memory in older women.

Short-term hormone treatment modulates emotion response circuitry in postmenopausal women

“…The increased activity seen with hormone treatment suggests enhanced responsiveness to emotional visual stimuli within this region relative to placebo treatment. While this finding may be compatible with previous reports describing increased arousal in response to salient negative material following hormone therapy (40), further investigation will be necessary to determine the source of the differences observed here.…”

Hormone therapy does not modify emotion-induced brain activity in older women

“…In this study, we did not find that current use of hormone therapy affected valence or arousal ratings, which differs from our previous report (Pruis et al, 2009). There are several differences between the two studies.…”

“…Verbal (Kampen and Sherwin, 1994) and visual (Smith et al, 2001) memory are enhanced in older women using long-term hormone therapy, while scene, face, and word recognition are not affected by short-term estrogen therapy (Schiff et al, 2005). Our previous work suggests that memory for emotional stimuli, including faces (LeBlanc et al, 2007) and scenes (Pruis et al, 2009), is not affected by short- and long-term hormone therapy, respectively. This would suggest that potential memory benefits of hormone therapy may only occur for specific types of information, but not including emotional information.…”

“…First, the negative scenes in this study had higher normative arousal ratings than the neutral or positive scenes, in part to try to increase the likelihood of obtaining amygdala activity. The normative arousal ratings in the previous study were the same across valence categories (Pruis et al, 2009). Thus, it may be that potential hormone effects on arousal in this study are overridden by the highly arousing nature of the negative stimuli.…”

“…Hormones affect emotional responses in older women as well. We recently showed that women on hormone therapy rate negative scenes as more arousing than positive scenes, and find negative scenes more arousing than do women not on hormone therapy (Pruis et al, 2009). Depression and anxiety disorders increase in women during hormonal transitions in their lives, including puberty (Birmaher et al, 1996), the post-partum period (O'Hara and Swain, 1996), and the menopausal transition (Freeman et al, 2006), suggesting that hormones influence mood and emotion.…”