Department of Psychology, UCLA, Los Angeles, California 90095.
Department of Psychiatry, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511.
J Neurosci. 2024 Oct 2;44(40):e1027242024. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1027-24.2024.
Emotionally salient experiences are encoded and remembered more strongly, an effect that can be amplified by hormones like cortisol. Such memories can in turn profoundly influence later behavior. However, little is known about the link between amplified salience encoding and subsequent behavior. This pathway may be particularly important for risky alcohol drinking, which has been linked to sensitized salience responses, memory, and cortisol. To test this possibility, we integrated pharmacology using a double-blind cross-over design with fMRI, cognitive, and motivation assays across a range of healthy male and female social drinkers. As anticipated, cortisol enhanced memory for salient alcohol-related events; critically, this bias was in turn associated with later alcohol motivation. Increased alcohol motivation was particularly pronounced in more susceptible risky drinkers, for whom cortisol enhanced brain salience responses to alcohol. These sensitized salience responses predicted both memory biases and alcohol motivation. Together, these findings reveal maladaptive consequences of enhanced salience encoding.
情绪相关的体验会被更强烈地编码和记忆，这种效应可以被皮质醇等激素放大。这些记忆反过来又会深刻地影响之后的行为。然而，关于增强的显著编码与后续行为之间的联系，我们知之甚少。对于风险饮酒来说，这种途径可能特别重要，因为风险饮酒与敏感的显著反应、记忆和皮质醇有关。为了检验这种可能性，我们在一系列健康的男性和女性社交饮酒者中，使用双盲交叉设计，结合药理学、功能磁共振成像、认知和动机测试，整合了相关研究。正如预期的那样，皮质醇增强了对显著的与酒精相关事件的记忆；关键的是，这种偏见反过来又与之后的酒精动机有关。对于更容易受影响的高风险饮酒者来说，酒精动机的增加更为明显，因为皮质醇增强了他们对酒精的大脑显著反应。这些敏感的显著反应预测了记忆偏差和酒精动机。总之，这些发现揭示了增强显著编码的不良适应后果。
