The emotional memory effect in Alzheimer's disease: Emotional words enhance recollective experience similarly in patients and control participants

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate emotional memory enhancement (EME) in Alzheimer's disease (AD). In particular, we were interested in exploring which memory process (i.e., recollection or familiarity) could be improved by emotional information in the course of the disease. Eighteen AD patients were compared with 15 normal controls on the Remember/Know/Guess paradigm following encoding of emotional and neutral words. AD patients' recollective experience was improved for emotional compared to neutral words to the same extent as that of normal controls, whereas emotion had no effect on participants' memory performance involving familiarity processes. Our results showed that AD patients' memory can be enhanced qualitatively but not quantitatively by an emotional material. Furthermore, we found that AD patients were as able as normal controls to benefit from the emotional content of information to improve the recollection of details.

Keywords:

• Alzheimer's disease
• Recollection
• Emotional valence

Notes

¹ To fulfill the criteria of probable AD, dementia must be established by clinical and neuropsychological examination. Moreover, cognitive impairments must be progressive and be observed in two or more areas of cognition. The onset of the deficits must be between the ages of 40 and 90 years. Finally, there should be no evidence of other diseases capable of producing a dementia syndrome.

² The measure of response bias B’’ (Grier, 1971) was computed using the following formula: [H (1 – H) –FA (1 – FA)]/[H (1 – H) + FA (1 – FA)] with H = (# recognition hits +.50) / (# total of items + 1) and FA = (# false alarms + .50)/(# total of items + 1).