No abstract

Post traumatic stress disorder is a psychiatric disease that is usually precipitated by life threatening stressors. Myocardial infarction, especially in the young can count as one such event. The development of post traumatic stress after a coronary event not only adversely effects psychiatric health, but leads to increased cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. There is increasing evidence that like major depression, post traumatic stress disorder is also a strong coronary risk factor. Early diagnosis and treatment of this disease in patients with acute manifestations of coronary artery disease can improve patient outcomes.

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] An extensive literature on the influence of emotion on memory asserts that memory for emotional information is remembered better than information lacking emotional content (Kensinger, 2009; Talmi et al., 2007; for review see Hamann, 2001). While decades of research have agreed upon memory advantages for emotional versus neutral information, research studying the impact of emotion on memory for associated details has shown differential effects of emotion on associated neutral details (Erk et al., 2003; Righi et al., 2015; Steinmetz et al., 2015). Using emotional-neutral stimulus pairs, the current set of experiments present novel findings from aging perspective to systematically explore the impact of embedded emotional information on associative memory representation of associated neutral episodic memory details. To accomplish this, three experiments were conducted. In all three experiments, younger and older participants were shown three types of emotional faces (happy, sad, and neutral) along with names. The first experiment investigated whether associative instructions and repetition of face-name pairs influence and promote formation of implicit emotional face-name associations. Using intentional and incidental instructions to encode face-name associations, in Experiment 2 and 3, respectively, participants' memory for whether names, shown with different facial expressions, can trigger emotional content of a study episode in the absence of the original emotional context at test, was assessed. Results indicate that while both younger and older adults show that names are integrated better with happy facial expressions than with sad expressions, older adults fail to show a benefit for associating a name with a happy emotional expression in the absence of associative encoding instructions. Overall, these results suggest that happy facial expressions can be implicitly learnt with or spilled over to associated neutral episodic details, like names. However, this integration is accomplished by older adults only under instructions to form face-name association.