Emotional memory enhancement in respect of positive visual stimuli in Alzheimer's disease emerges after rich and deep encoding

Effect of Emotion and Type of Encoding on Memory for Actions: Verbal and Subject-Performed Tasks

“…However, Okada and Matsuo [38] and Ikeda et al [39] showed an effect of emotional intensity for personal memories, suggesting that an effect of emotion on memory in this population can be observed in some circumstances. Results reported by Sava et al [34] support this suggestion, as these authors reported better memory performance for emotional stimuli in AD patients when the encoding of the stimuli was rich and elaborate.…”

“…Similar results were observed by Lekeu et al [13], who found a higher percentage of correctly recalled sentences for low-familiarity actions than for high-familiarity actions in healthy elderly individuals. Surprisingly, and contrary to our prediction and the literature [e.g., 31, 34, 36], no effect of emotion was observed in our recognition task, except for the C index. In fact, we observed a more liberal response strategy for the positive drawings, which means that the participants were more prone to consider as seen positive actions than negative and neutral ones.…”

“…In particular, contrary to young adults, a positivity effect was frequently reported in ageing [31]. This better recall and recognition for positive items than for neutral or negative ones was replicated in many experiments with different types of stimuli, such as facial expressions, words, or images [32], in free recall tasks [33, 34] as well as in recognition tasks [35]. In general, participants with AD seem not to benefit from this emotional effect [34-37].…”

“…In the first experiment, the learning was incidental and the pattern of results appeared to be nonsignificantly different between the SPT and the VT condition in AD. As suggested by Sava et al [34], the presence of an effect in AD can depend on rich and elaborate encoding. Thus, we conducted a second experiment in which we expected the emergence of an emotional enactment effect due to a reinforced and intentional encoding phase.…”

“…This better recall and recognition for positive items than for neutral or negative ones was replicated in many experiments with different types of stimuli, such as facial expressions, words, or images [32], in free recall tasks [33, 34] as well as in recognition tasks [35]. In general, participants with AD seem not to benefit from this emotional effect [34-37]. However, Okada and Matsuo [38] and Ikeda et al [39] showed an effect of emotional intensity for personal memories, suggesting that an effect of emotion on memory in this population can be observed in some circumstances.…”