Acute effects of alcohol on memory: Impact of emotional context and serial position |
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| Authors: | Jennie Brown Catherine M. Brignell Sharinjeet K. Dhiman H. Valerie Curran Sunjeev K. Kamboj |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Memory Clinic, Felix Platter-Hospital, University Center for Medicine of Aging Basel, Basel, Switzerland;2. Department of Neurology, University Hospital Basel, Basel, Switzerland;3. Neuroscience Research Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;4. ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Sydney, Australia;5. Department of Psychiatry, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany;6. Center for Affective, Stress and Sleep Disorders, Psychiatric Clinics of the University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland;7. Center of Old Age Psychiatry, Psychiatric Clinics of the University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland;8. Department of Mathematics and Technology, University of Applied Sciences Koblenz, Koblenz, Germany;1. Center for Alcohol and Addictions Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI, United States;2. University of South Dakota, Department of Psychology, 414 E. Clark Street, Vermillion, SD 57069, United States;3. Syracuse University, Department of Psychology, 900 S. Crouse Ave., Syracuse, NY 13244, United States;1. Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Saguenay, Québec, Canada;2. Centre de recherche universitaire interdisciplinaire sur la qualité et les saines habitudes de vie, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Saguenay, Québec, Canada;3. Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Chicoutimi, Saguenay, Québec, Canada;4. Université du Québec à Montréal, Québec, Canada |
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| 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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