Impairment of aversive episodic memories during Covid-19 pandemic: The impact of emotional context on memory processes

The threatening context of the COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique setting to study the effects of negative psychological symptoms on memory processes. Episodic memory is an essential function of the human being related to the ability to store and remember experiences and anticipate possible events...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Neurobiology of learning and memory 2022-01, Vol.187, p.107575-107575, Article 107575
Main Authors: Leon, Candela Sofía, Bonilla, Matías, Urreta Benítez, Facundo Antonio, Brusco, Luis Ignacio, Wang, Jingyi, Forcato, Cecilia
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Anxiety
Anxiety - complications
Anxiety - etiology
Consolidation
COVID-19 - psychology
Depression
Depression - complications
Depression - etiology
Emotions
Encoding
Female
Humans
Male
Memory Disorders - etiology
Memory, Episodic
Mental Recall
Young Adult
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Summary:The threatening context of the COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique setting to study the effects of negative psychological symptoms on memory processes. Episodic memory is an essential function of the human being related to the ability to store and remember experiences and anticipate possible events in the future. Studying this function in this context is crucial to understand what effects the pandemic will have on the formation of episodic memories. To study this, the formation of episodic memories was evaluated by free recall, recognition, and episode order tasks for an aversive and neutral content. The results indicated that aversive episodic memory is impaired both in the free recall task and in the recognition task. Even the beneficial effect that emotional memory usually has for the episodic order was undermined as there were no differences between the neutral and aversive condition. The present work adds to the evidence that indicates that the level of activation does not modify memory processes in a linear way, which also depends on the type of recall and the characteristics of the content to be encoded.
ISSN:1074-7427
1095-9564
DOI:10.1016/j.nlm.2021.107575