Smeets Tom, Otgaar Henry, Candel Ingrid, Wolf Oliver T
Department of Cognitive Psychology, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany.
Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2008 Nov;33(10):1378-86. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2008.07.009. Epub 2008 Sep 13.
Adrenal stress hormones released in response to acute stress may yield memory-enhancing effects when released post-learning and impairing effects at memory retrieval, especially for emotional memory material. However, so far these differential effects of stress hormones on the various memory phases for neutral and emotional memory material have not been demonstrated within one experiment. This study investigated whether, in line with their effects on true memory, stress and stress-induced adrenal stress hormones affect the encoding, consolidation, and retrieval of emotional and neutral false memories. Participants (N=90) were exposed to a stressor before encoding, during consolidation, before retrieval, or were not stressed and then were subjected to neutral and emotional versions of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott word list learning paradigm. Twenty-four hours later, recall of presented words (true recall) and non-presented critical lure words (false recall) was assessed. Results show that stress exposure resulted in superior true memory performance in the consolidation stress group and reduced true memory performance in the retrieval stress group compared to the other groups, predominantly for emotional words. These memory-enhancing and memory-impairing effects were strongly related to stress-induced cortisol and sympathetic activity measured via salivary alpha-amylase levels. Neutral and emotional false recall, on the other hand, was neither affected by stress exposure, nor related to cortisol and sympathetic activity following stress. These results demonstrate the importance of stress-induced hormone-related activity in enhancing memory consolidation and in impairing memory retrieval, in particular for emotional memory material.
应激反应中释放的肾上腺应激激素在学习后释放时可能会产生增强记忆的效果，而在记忆提取时则会产生损害作用，尤其是对于情绪记忆材料。然而，到目前为止，应激激素对中性和情绪记忆材料不同记忆阶段的这些差异效应尚未在一个实验中得到证实。本研究调查了应激和应激诱导的肾上腺应激激素是否与它们对真实记忆的影响一致，会影响情绪和中性错误记忆的编码、巩固和提取。参与者（N = 90）在编码前、巩固期间、提取前暴露于应激源，或不施加应激，然后接受Deese-Roediger-McDermott单词表学习范式的中性和情绪版本。24小时后，评估对呈现单词的回忆（真实回忆）和未呈现的关键诱词的回忆（错误回忆）。结果表明，与其他组相比，应激暴露导致巩固应激组的真实记忆表现更好，而提取应激组的真实记忆表现下降，主要是针对情绪单词。这些增强记忆和损害记忆的效应与通过唾液α-淀粉酶水平测量的应激诱导的皮质醇和交感神经活动密切相关。另一方面，中性和情绪错误回忆既不受应激暴露的影响，也与应激后的皮质醇和交感神经活动无关。这些结果证明了应激诱导的激素相关活动在增强记忆巩固和损害记忆提取方面的重要性，特别是对于情绪记忆材料。
