Memory for emotional stimuli in patients with Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

Although a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is memory impairment, there is speculation that recall may be enhanced when an emotional component is associated with an event. The current study aims to assess whether patients with AD would recall emotionally laden material better than neutral stimuli. DSM-IV-diagnosed AD patients with mild to moderate dementia, as well as groups of young and elderly healthy controls, participated in this study. All subjects were administered three word lists for three trials each. The words were positive, negative, or neutral in valence and matched for concreteness, emotionality, and pleasantness. As expected, the controls performed significantly better than the AD patients. Importantly, the pattern of recall for the emotions was different, such that both control groups recalled all emotions equally, whereas the AD patients recalled significantly more negative words than positive or neutral. These findings of improved immediate memory for emotional material in AD lends support to the notion that mnemonic functions are differentially affected in the disease.

Is working memory affective in dementia of alzheimer's type?

“…In fact, a series of previous studies with DAT patients has yielded mixed results. For example, Kensinger and colleagues [8] in a sentence generation task and with verbal descriptions [9] found no emotional enhancement effect, while Fleming et al, [10] in an immediate recall task for emotional words and Satler and Tomaz [11] who tested DAT patients' ability to recognize emotional information in a visuo-spatial WM task found emotional benefits. Consequently, generalizing WM emotional enhancement effects in DAT must be taken with caution and it may be that results depend on the type of WM task used.…”

Filling in memory gaps through emotional communication; promising pathways in caring for persons with dementia

“…friend, hate and thermometer, respectively) in patients with mild to moderate AD (N=25) versus young (n=27) and old (n=19) controls [15]. AD patients appeared to recall more emotionally valent than neutral words.…”

“…In view of studying memory effects of emotional communication, it is also important to realize that the severity of dementia varies from mild to substantial cognitive impairments and can manifest itself in more or less maladaptive behavior and mood disturbances. So, information and emotions may be processed differently depending not only on someone's personality but also on the type and progression of the diagnosed dementia [6,7]. The main aim of the paper is to explore the literature for empirical knowledge supporting the greater enhancement in recall by means of emotional stimuli compared to neutral stimuli in persons with dementia.…”

A Review on “New Treatment Strategies for Alzheimer’s Disease as Neurodegenerative Disease and Its Risk Factor Cause, Symptoms, and Treatment at Worldwide”

“…In 2010, approximately 4.7 million individuals of 65 years old and more seasoned were living with Alzheimer's sickness in the US. Alzheimer's ailment association gives factual report an extent of the populace influenced a little more than a tenth of individuals in the more than 65 age bunch have the infection in the US in 2013 [10][11][12]. AD is the main source of dementia around the world, influencing more than half of the general number of deranged people, which has been assessed to associate with 24 million over all countries.…”