Relationship between the number of life events and memory capacity in children

Abstract

Stressful life events can result into declined memory performance at later age. One hypothesis suggests that stress affects the hippocampus, a brain area important for memory functioning. This study explored a potential relationship between the number of negative stressful life events and hippocampus-dependent declarative but not hippocampus-independent procedural memory performance in a community sample of 255 children, aged 6–12 years. The findings revealed that negative stressful life events were negatively related to verbal declarative memory, but not to nonverbal declarative and procedural memory. The memory impairments could not be accounted for by attention and sleep disturbances, and parenting characteristics as perceived by the child did not influence the vulnerability for the stress-related memory impairments. These findings provide further insight into the deleterious effects of negative stressful life events on learning in school-aged children.

Keywords:

• Life events
• Memory
• Children
• Stress

Acknowledgments

The authors want to thank all schools and families for participation and students of our department for collection of data. Dr. Veerman is thanked for providing the Questionnaire of Life Events and Dr. Markus for providing the EMBU-C questionnaire.