Impact of Negative Emotion on the Neural Correlates of Long-Term Recognition in Younger and Older Adults

Abstract

Some studies have suggested that the memory advantage for negative emotional information over neutral information (“negativity effect”) is reduced in aging. Besides the fact that most findings are based on immediate retrieval, the neural underpinnings of long-term emotional memory in aging have so far not been investigated. To address these issues, we assessed recognition of neutral and negative scenes after 1- and 3-week retention intervals in younger and older adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We further used an event-related design in order to disentangle successful, false, and true recognition. This study revealed four key findings: (1) increased retention interval induced an increased rate of false recognitions for negative scenes, canceling out the negativity effect (present for hit rates only) on discrimination in both younger and older adults; (2) in younger, but not older, adults, reduced activity of the medial temporal lobe was observed over time for neutral scenes, but not for negative scenes, where stable or increased activity was seen; (3) engagement of amygdala (AMG) was observed in older adults after a 3-week delay during successful recognition of negative scenes (hits vs. misses) in comparison with neutral scenes, which may indicate engagement of automatic processes, but engagement of ventrolateral prefrontal cortex was unrelated to AMG activity and performance; and (4) after 3 weeks, but not after 1 week, true recognition of negative scenes was characterized by more activity in left hippocampus and lateral occipito-temporal regions (hits vs. false alarms). As these regions are known to be related to consolidation mechanisms, the observed pattern may indicate the presence of delayed consolidation of true memories. Nonetheless, older adults’ low performance in discrimination of negative scenes could reflect the fact that overall, after long delays of retention, they rely more on general information rather than on perceptual detail in making recognition judgments.

Exploring Age-Related Changes in Resting State Functional Connectivity of the Amygdala: From Young to Middle Adulthood

“…The amygdala, insula and temporal cortex are critical to empathetic experience ( Shdo et al, 2017 ), and the temporal pole plays an instrumental role in supporting long-term social and emotional memory ( Olson et al, 2007 ). Age-related increase in amygdala rsFC with the temporal cortex may be associated with older adults’ reliance on general information rather than perceptual details in emotion recognition ( Kalpouzos et al, 2012 ). Disruption of this circuit was related to late life depression ( Li W. et al, 2015 ), and neurofeedback training altered amygdala temporal pole connectivity during positive autobiographical recall in depression patients ( Young et al, 2018 ).…”

Aging effects on the resting state motor network and interlimb coordination

“…Structural changes of the corpus callosum with age impact upon cortical activity both at rest and during task performance, with important implications for motor behavior (Fling et al, 2011;Serbruyns et al, 2013). Hence, multimodal studies will be crucial to understand how age-related functional and structural changes (O'Sullivan et al, 2001;Salat et al, 2005) determine motor behavior (Kalpouzos et al, 2012).…”

Could L2 Lexical Attrition Be Predicted in the Dimension of Valence, Arousal, and Dominance?

“…Although robust and long-lasting emotion–memory effects were observed in previous studies, only three of them assessed the emotion–memory effects using longer retention intervals up to 1 year ( Bradley et al, 1992 ; Dolcos et al, 2005 ; Weymar et al, 2015 ). In most of the studies reviewed in this study, the emotion–memory effects were assessed either immediately after the tasks ( Fontaine et al, 2007 ; Detandt et al, 2017 ) or after a retention interval of a few minutes ( Parkin et al, 1982 ), or weeks ( Kalpouzos et al, 2012 ). However, our study covered a retention interval from 1 to 19 years.…”