Center on Aging Psychology, Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Neuropsychology. 2013 Nov;27(6):691-701. doi: 10.1037/a0033973. Epub 2013 Sep 16.
This study investigated whether the observed absence of emotional memory enhancement in recognition tasks in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) could be related to their greater proportion of familiarity-based responses for all stimuli, and whether recognition tests with emotional items had better discriminative power for aMCI patients than those with neutral items.
In total, 31 aMCI patients and 30 healthy older adults participated in a recognition test followed by remember/know judgments. Positive, neutral, and negative faces were used as stimuli.
For overall recognition performance, emotional memory enhancement was found only in healthy controls; they remembered more negative and positive stimuli than neutral ones. For "remember" responses, we found equivalent emotional memory enhancement in both groups, though a greater proportion of "remember" responses was observed in normal controls. For "know" responses, aMCI patients presented a larger proportion than normal controls did, and their "know" responses were not affected by emotion. A negative correlation was found between emotional enhancement effect and the memory performance related to "know" responses. In addition, receiver operating characteristic curve analysis revealed higher diagnostic accuracy for recognition test with emotional stimuli than with neutral stimuli.
The present results implied that the absence of the emotional memory enhancement effect in aMCI patients might be related to their tendency to rely more on familiarity-based "know" responses for all stimuli. Furthermore, recognition memory tests using emotional stimuli may be better able than neutral stimuli to differentiate people with aMCI from cognitively normal older adults.
本研究旨在探讨遗忘型轻度认知障碍（aMCI）患者在识别任务中观察到的情绪记忆增强缺失是否与其对所有刺激更倾向于基于熟悉度的“知道”反应有关，以及是否具有情绪项目的识别测试比具有中性项目的识别测试对 aMCI 患者具有更好的区分能力。
共有 31 名 aMCI 患者和 30 名健康老年人参加了识别测试，随后进行了记住/知道判断。积极、中性和消极面孔被用作刺激。
对于整体识别性能，仅在健康对照组中发现了情绪记忆增强；他们比中性刺激更能记住消极和积极的刺激。对于“记住”反应，我们发现两组都有相同的情绪记忆增强，尽管正常对照组中“记住”反应的比例更高。对于“知道”反应，aMCI 患者的比例高于正常对照组，且他们的“知道”反应不受情绪影响。此外，我们还发现情绪增强效应与与“知道”反应相关的记忆表现之间存在负相关。另外，接收者操作特征曲线分析显示，具有情绪刺激的识别测试比具有中性刺激的识别测试具有更高的诊断准确性。
本研究结果表明，aMCI 患者中缺乏情绪记忆增强效应可能与他们对所有刺激更倾向于基于熟悉度的“知道”反应有关。此外，使用情绪刺激的识别记忆测试可能比中性刺激更能区分认知正常的老年人和 aMCI 患者。
