Decreased susceptibility to false memories from misinformation in hormonal contraception users

Abstract

Sex hormones are increasingly implicated in memory formation. Recent literature has documented a relationship between hormones and emotional memory and sex differences, which are likely related to hormones, have long been demonstrated in a variety of mnemonic domains, including false memories. Hormonal contraception (HC), which alters sex hormones, has been associated with a bias towards gist memory and away from detailed memory in women who use it during an emotional memory task. Here, we investigated whether HC was associated with changes in susceptibility to false memories, which may be related to the formation of gist memories. We tested false memory susceptibility using two well-validated false memory paradigms: the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task, and a story-based misinformation task. We found that hormonal contraceptive users were less susceptible to false memories compared to non-users in the misinformation task, and no differences were seen between groups on the DRM task. We hypothesise that the differences in false memories from the misinformation task may be related to hormonal contraceptive users' memory bias away from details, towards gist memory.

Oral contraceptive pill use is associated with localized decreases in cortical thickness

“…Primarily, for ethical and practical reasons, we used a quasiexperimental design using women who have chosen to use OCs for at least 3 months without electing to discontinue, rather than using a randomized design with a placebo control. It is possible that the participants who chose to begin OC use differ systematically in some way compared with participants who did not, although our participants did not differ in basic demographic characteristics, and other investigations have shown that hormonal contraceptive users do not differ from NC women on personality measures, SAT scores, or political orientation [Petersen et al, 2014b]. Additionally, within the naturally-cycling group, follicular and luteal women did not have significantly different estradiol levels, despite relatively conservative definitions of the follicular and luteal phases.…”

Women using hormonal contraceptives show increased valence ratings and memory performance for emotional information

“…In a recent review, Montoya and Bos [15] highlight the impact of OC on social–emotional behaviours, and report impaired fear extinction, altered emotional memory, and reduced emotion recognition accuracy in OC-users. Specifically, when it comes to differences in emotional memory, women using HC show enhanced memory for gist information but not details of an emotional story compared to a neutral story, whereas in contrast HC-non-users remember more details than gist information [19, 20]. In another study, recall performance of emotional (positive and negative) images differed between women using HC and HC-non-users depending on their stress hormone (noradrenergic and cortisol) response [21].…”

Effects of oral contraceptives and natural menstrual cycling on environmental learning

“…Interestingly, in OC users, the negative effects of cortisol on memory seem to be reduced [ 10 ]. This finding is mainly due to an interaction between hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal stress-related hormones and hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal hormones (see [ 11 ]). In line with this result, Petersen et al [ 11 ] found a reduction in false memory susceptibility, while Nielsen et al [ 12 ] observed better recall of emotional gist in OC users.…”

“…This finding is mainly due to an interaction between hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal stress-related hormones and hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal hormones (see [ 11 ]). In line with this result, Petersen et al [ 11 ] found a reduction in false memory susceptibility, while Nielsen et al [ 12 ] observed better recall of emotional gist in OC users. Gogos et al [ 13 ] found that OC users performed better on verbal memory tasks compared to NCW.…”