Abstract
Many associative memory traces are charged with emotion that can either impair or enhance subsequent retrieval. Various factors may influence such emotion effects, including the nature of associations and type of emotions.
We show that long-term recognition memory of very close verbal associations was enhanced for emotionally charged material, and these effects differed between two negative emotion categories matched for arousal level. Specifically, memory was better for word pairs related to disgust than word pairs related to fear. Furthermore, these two emotions distinctively modulated neural processes during encoding and its relationship with retrieval, regardless of arousal evoked by word pairs. Amygdala and perirhinal cortex activity were associated with enhanced memory for disgust-related unitizations, whereas better memory for fear-related unitizations engaged parahippocampal cortex and hippocampus. Finally, the magnitude of amygdala activation during encoding was related to the subsequent fidelity of hippocampal activity patterns during retrieval.
These results show that dissociable neural pathways and reinstatement mechanisms are involved in associative memory for different emotion categories and that arousal alone cannot fully explain emotional influences on associative memory.
