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Acute effects of alcohol on memory: Impact of emotional context and serial position

Acute effects of alcohol on memory: Impact of emotional context and serial position
Acute effects of alcohol on memory: Impact of emotional context and serial position
Although the amnestic effects of alcohol in humans are well known, its effects on emotional memory are unclear. In this study, using a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled design, we examine narrative emotional episodic memory in healthy human female volunteers (n = 32) who received either a single dose of alcohol (0.6 g/kg), or a placebo and then viewed neutral story elements presented in either a neutral or emotional context. Memory was tested for gist and detail of the neutral elements 3 days later in a surprise recognition test. Since alcohol modulates GABAergic neurotransmission and may exert its effects on emotion through the limbic system, we predicted that acute alcohol treatment would reduce the expected emotional memory-advantage for gist, leaving detail memory relatively unaffected. Furthermore, given previous findings showing that ‘primacy’ memory is enhanced by physiological arousal, we predicted that reduced arousal produced by alcohol would have the opposite effect and impair primacy memory relative to the middle or ‘recency’ sections of the narrative. Emotional arousal was expected to oppose this effect, so impaired primacy memory following alcohol was only expected in the neutral version of the narrative. Although there was a main effect of story phase (though not of story version), contrary to expectations, alcohol impaired primacy memory for emotionally encoded neutral material. The results suggest that under certain circumstances emotional context or physiological arousal make memories labile and susceptible to disruption through pharmacological manipulation during encoding
emotional-memory, alcohol, amnesia, gist, arousal, primacy, serial position
1074-7427
Brown, Jennie
6f016b7c-26f6-4157-8553-57b622438d90
Brignell, Catherine M.
ec44ecae-8687-4bbb-bc81-8c2c8f27febd
Dhiman, Sharinjeet K.
66514fc2-1e74-4fb2-aedf-8bcffbe7593b
Curran, H. Valerie
0bbd99ae-0f3a-4566-947f-54d1b09cab41
Kamboj, Sunjeev K.
af766a66-19c2-4463-ad07-89837670adc7
Brown, Jennie
6f016b7c-26f6-4157-8553-57b622438d90
Brignell, Catherine M.
ec44ecae-8687-4bbb-bc81-8c2c8f27febd
Dhiman, Sharinjeet K.
66514fc2-1e74-4fb2-aedf-8bcffbe7593b
Curran, H. Valerie
0bbd99ae-0f3a-4566-947f-54d1b09cab41
Kamboj, Sunjeev K.
af766a66-19c2-4463-ad07-89837670adc7

Brown, Jennie, Brignell, Catherine M., Dhiman, Sharinjeet K., Curran, H. Valerie and Kamboj, Sunjeev K. (2010) Acute effects of alcohol on memory: Impact of emotional context and serial position. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. (doi:10.1016/j.nlm.2009.12.010).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Although the amnestic effects of alcohol in humans are well known, its effects on emotional memory are unclear. In this study, using a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled design, we examine narrative emotional episodic memory in healthy human female volunteers (n = 32) who received either a single dose of alcohol (0.6 g/kg), or a placebo and then viewed neutral story elements presented in either a neutral or emotional context. Memory was tested for gist and detail of the neutral elements 3 days later in a surprise recognition test. Since alcohol modulates GABAergic neurotransmission and may exert its effects on emotion through the limbic system, we predicted that acute alcohol treatment would reduce the expected emotional memory-advantage for gist, leaving detail memory relatively unaffected. Furthermore, given previous findings showing that ‘primacy’ memory is enhanced by physiological arousal, we predicted that reduced arousal produced by alcohol would have the opposite effect and impair primacy memory relative to the middle or ‘recency’ sections of the narrative. Emotional arousal was expected to oppose this effect, so impaired primacy memory following alcohol was only expected in the neutral version of the narrative. Although there was a main effect of story phase (though not of story version), contrary to expectations, alcohol impaired primacy memory for emotionally encoded neutral material. The results suggest that under certain circumstances emotional context or physiological arousal make memories labile and susceptible to disruption through pharmacological manipulation during encoding

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More information

Published date: 2010
Keywords: emotional-memory, alcohol, amnesia, gist, arousal, primacy, serial position

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 73534
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/73534
ISSN: 1074-7427
PURE UUID: 2428c01f-33c3-480e-9577-e21d83623ee2
ORCID for Catherine M. Brignell: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-7768-6272

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Date deposited: 10 Mar 2010
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 02:50

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Contributors

Author: Jennie Brown
Author: Sharinjeet K. Dhiman
Author: H. Valerie Curran
Author: Sunjeev K. Kamboj

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