“Disorganized in time”: Impact of bottom-up and top-down negative emotion generation on memory formation among healthy and traumatized adolescents

Abstract

"Travelling in time," a central feature of episodic memory is severely affected among individuals with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) with two opposite effects: vivid traumatic memories are unorganized in temporality (bottom-up processes), non-traumatic personal memories tend to lack spatio-temporal details and false recognitions occur more frequently that in the general population (top-down processes). To test the effect of these two types of processes (i.e. bottom-up and top-down) on emotional memory, we conducted two studies in healthy and traumatized adolescents, a period of life in which vulnerability to emotion is particularly high. Using negative and neutral images selected from the international affective picture system (IAPS), stimuli were divided into perceptual images (emotion generated by perceptual details) and conceptual images (emotion generated by the general meaning of the material). Both categories of stimuli were then used, along with neutral pictures, in a memory task with two phases (encoding and recognition). In both populations, we reported a differential effect of the emotional material on encoding and recognition. Negative perceptual scenes induced an attentional capture effect during encoding and enhanced the recollective distinctiveness. Conversely, the encoding of conceptual scenes was similar to neutral ones, but the conceptual relatedness induced false memories at retrieval. However, among individuals with PTSD, two subgroups of patients were identified. The first subgroup processed the scenes faster than controls, except for the perceptual scenes, and obtained similar performances to controls in the recognition task. The second subgroup group desmonstrated an attentional deficit in the encoding task with no benefit from the distinctiveness associated with negative perceptual scenes on memory performances. These findings provide a new perspective on how negative emotional information may have opposite influences on memory in normal and traumatized individuals. It also gives clues to understand how intrusive memories and overgeneralization takes place in PTSD.

Emotional Memory in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: A Systematic PRISMA Review of Controlled Studies

“…Among studies involving tasks with picture stimuli: five studies used a recognition memory task (Chemtob et al, 1999; Whalley et al, 2009; Brohawn et al, 2010; Mickley Steinmetz et al, 2012; Patel et al, 2016); one study used a recognition memory task after an oddball task (Guillery-Girard et al, 2013); one study used an item-method directed forgetting task (Baumann et al, 2013); and another study used a delayed memory free recall test (Nicholson et al, 2014).…”

“…Six studies included only women, three studies included only men, and nine studies included both. Sixteen studies included only adult PTSD patients, and two studies included only adolescent and/or child PTSD patients (Moradi et al, 2000; Guillery-Girard et al, 2013). Eleven studies involved patients with one or two specific types of traumatic event (Zeitlin and McNally, 1991; Vrana et al, 1995; McNally et al, 1998; Chemtob et al, 1999; Moradi et al, 2000; Bremner et al, 2003; Golier et al, 2003; Zoellner et al, 2003; Baumann et al, 2013; Thomaes et al, 2013; Herzog et al, 2017), six studies involved patients with different traumatic events (Whalley et al, 2009; Brohawn et al, 2010; Mickley Steinmetz et al, 2012; Tapia et al, 2012; Nicholson et al, 2014; Patel et al, 2016), and one study did not specify (Guillery-Girard et al, 2013).…”

“…Five other studies used different types of image-based recognition tasks (Chemtob et al, 1999; Brohawn et al, 2010; Baumann et al, 2013; Guillery-Girard et al, 2013; Patel et al, 2016). Four of them revealed no differences in the accuracy of emotional picture recognition compared to neutral picture recognition in PTSD groups and control groups.…”

Altered default mode network connectivity in adolescents with post-traumatic stress disorder

“…We, and others, have previously shown that the hippocampus presents both structural and functional abnormalities in adult (Bremner et al, 2003) and adolescent abuse-related PTSD (Dégeilh et al, 2017; Postel et al, 2019). Symptoms in adolescent PTSD largely reflect those present in adults, with deficits in attentional control (Guillery-Girard et al, 2013), autobiographical memory (Crane et al, 2014; Ogle et al, 2013) and fear extinction (Keding and Herringa, 2015). What happens at the brain level?…”

Brain transcriptome profiles in mouse model simulating features of post-traumatic stress disorder

“…In particular, failure to inhibit fear learning and fear memory consolidation are considered to be precipitating factors in the development of PTSD [ 14 ]. With regards to cognition, PTSD patients showed significantly less activation in sensory association areas, suggesting diversion of attention from the presented stimuli, perhaps due to increased focus on the elicited trauma memory [ 15 - 17 ]. It has been suggested that cognitive impairments exhibited by people with PTSD result from intrusive flashback memories that transiently interfere with ongoing cognitive processing [ 17 ].…”