Abstract
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.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 13-29 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | Journal of Experimental Psychology: General |
Volume | 148 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 2019 |
Keywords
- Acute stress
- Associative memory
- Emotion
- Item memory
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- General Psychology
- Developmental Neuroscience