Logo image
Acute stress throughout the memory cycle: Diverging effects on associative and item memory
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Acute stress throughout the memory cycle: Diverging effects on associative and item memory

Elizabeth V Goldfarb, Alexa Tompary, Lila Davachi and Elizabeth A Phelps
Journal of experimental psychology. General, v 148(1)
01 Jan 2019
PMID: 30221962
url
https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000472View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

Adolescent Adult Association Learning - physiology Emotions - physiology Female Humans Male Recognition, Psychology - physiology Stress, Psychological - physiopathology Young Adult
Acute stress can modulate memory for individual parts of an event (items), but whether it similarly influences memory for associations between items remains unclear. We used a within-subjects design to explore the influence of acute stress on item and associative memory in humans. Participants associated negative words with neutral objects, rated their subjective arousal for each pair, and completed delayed item and paired associative recognition tasks. We found strikingly different patterns of acute stress effects on item and associative memory: for high-arousal pairs, preencoding stress enhanced associative memory, whereas postencoding stress enhanced item memory. Preretrieval stress consistently impaired both forms of memory. We found that the influence of stress-induced cortisol also varied, with a linear relationship between cortisol and item memory but a quadratic relationship between cortisol and associative memory. These findings reveal key differences in how stress, throughout the memory cycle, shapes our memories for items and associations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Metrics

12 Record Views
41 citations in Scopus

Details

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#3 Good Health and Well-Being

InCites Highlights

Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:

Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Psychology, Experimental
Logo image