Denkova Ekaterina, Chakrabarty Trisha, Dolcos Sanda, Dolcos Florin
Department of Psychiatry, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
J Vis Exp. 2011 Aug 26(54):2396. doi: 10.3791/2396.
Recollection of emotional autobiographical memories (AMs) is important to healthy cognitive and affective functioning--remembering positive AMs is associated with increased personal well-being and self-esteem, whereas remembering and ruminating on negative AMs may lead to affective disorders. Although significant progress has been made in understanding the brain mechanisms underlying AM retrieval in general, less is known about the effect of emotion on the subjective re-experience of AMs and the associated neural correlates. This is in part due to the fact that, unlike the investigations of the emotion effect on memory for laboratory-based microevents, often times AM studies do not have a clear focus on the emotional aspects of remembering personal events. Here, we present a protocol that allows investigation of the neural correlates of recollecting emotional AMs using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Cues for these memories are collected prior to scanning by means of an autobiographical memory questionnaire (AMQ), therefore allowing for proper selection of emotional AMs based on their phenomenological properties (i.e., intensity, vividness, personal significance). This protocol can be used in healthy and clinical populations alike.
对情感性自传体记忆（AMs）的回忆对健康的认知和情感功能很重要——回忆积极的AMs与个人幸福感和自尊的提升相关，而回忆和反复思考消极的AMs可能导致情感障碍。尽管在总体上理解AMs提取背后的大脑机制方面已经取得了重大进展，但关于情感对AMs主观重新体验及相关神经关联的影响，我们所知甚少。部分原因在于，与对基于实验室的微事件记忆的情感效应研究不同，AMs研究往往没有明确聚焦于回忆个人事件的情感方面。在此，我们提出一种方案，该方案允许使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）来研究回忆情感性AMs的神经关联。这些记忆的线索在扫描前通过自传体记忆问卷（AMQ）收集，因此能够基于其现象学特性（即强度、生动性、个人意义）对情感性AMs进行恰当选择。该方案可用于健康人群和临床人群。
