Impaired Memory Retrieval after Psychosocial Stress in Healthy Young Men
By S. Kuhlmann, M. Piel, Oliver T. Wolf. Journal of Neuroscience, 2005
697 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Glucocorticoids (GCs) are known to modulate memory in animals and humans. One popular model suggests that stress or GC treatment enhances memory consolidation while impairing delayed memory retrieval. Studies in humans have documented that treatment with GCs impairs delayed memory retrieval. Similar alterations after exposure to stress have not been observed thus far. In the present study, 19 young healthy male subjects were exposed to either a standardized psychosocial laboratory stressor (Trier Social Stress Test) or a control condition in a crossover manner. After both treatments, retrieval of a word list (learned 24 h earlier) containing 10 neutral, 10 negative, and 10 positive words was tested. The stressor induced a significant increase in salivary free cortisol and a decrease in mood. Memory retrieval (free recall) was significantly impaired after the stress condition. Follow-up analysis revealed that negative and positive words (i.e., emotionally arousing words) were affected, whereas no effect was observed for neutral words. No changes were detected for cued recall, working memory, or attention. The present study thus demonstrates that psychosocial stress impairs memory retrieval in humans and suggests that emotionally arousing material is especially sensitive to this effect.
Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/069b69a410d6220b36ba7ad36a3a39e13cfdf1fe
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Behavioral Neuroscience
- Collin R. Park
- Robin S. Edelstein
- L. Levine
- Adam M. Campbell
- Oliver T. Wolf
- D. Diamond
- P. Zoladz
- Joshua D. Halonen
In Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Emotion and memory narrowing: A review and goal-relevance approach (2009, background): “Other research shows that acute stress accompanied by arousal enhances encoding and consolidation (Roozendaal, 2002 ; Roozendaal, Okuda, Van der Zee, & McGaugh, 2006 ), particularly when the information being encoded is emotional (Buchanan & Lovallo, 2001 ; Cahill, Gorski, & Le, 2003 ; Payne et ”
- Stress and memory retrieval: mechanisms and consequences (2017, background): “Stress and memory retrieval outside the domain of hippocampus-based memories Initially, it appeared that the effects of stress on memory retrieval are restricted to hippocampus-based episodic/ spatial memory tasks [16 ,19].”
- Cognitive neuroscience of emotional memory (2006, neutral): “, but similar manipulations during retrieval impair recall of earlier memorie”
- The Temporal Dynamics Model of Emotional Memory Processing: A Synthesis on the Neurobiological Basis of Stress-Induced Amnesia, Flashbulb and Traumatic Memories, and the Yerkes-Dodson Law (2007, background): “…Conrad et al. [158]; Roozendaal et al. [159]) and people (Kirschbaum et al. [160]; de Quervain et al. [161]; Wolf et al. [162]; Payne et al. [163]; Buss et al. [164]; Wolf et al. [165]; Elzinga et al. [76]; Kuhlmann et al. [166]; Kuhlmann et al. [167]; Payne et al. [168]; Buchanan et al. [169]).”
- Stress and Memory: Behavioral Effects and Neurobiological Mechanisms (2007, neutral): “[116]).”