Negative Emotional Arousal Impairs Associative Memory Performance for Emotionally Neutral Content in Healthy Participants.

ABSTRACT: The effect of emotional arousal on memory presents a complex pattern with previous studies reporting conflicting results of both improved and reduced memory performance following arousal manipulations. In this study we further tested the effect of negative emotional arousal (NEA) on individual-item recognition and associative recognition of neutral stimuli in healthy participants, and hypothesized that NEA will particularly impair associative memory performance. The current study consists of two experiments; in both, participants studied a list of word-pairs and were then tested for items (items recognition test), and for associations (associative recognition test). In the first experiment, the arousal manipulation was induced by flashing emotionally-negative or neutral pictures between st

SUBMITTER: Guez J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4505890 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature