Observations in everyday life provide abundant evidence that facts and events associated with strong emotion are better remembered than those that are not. In many circumstances, contextual details are also more likely to be remembered for emotional as compared to neutral events. For example, nearly everyone approximately 6 years or older in 1963 claims to remember their whereabouts at the moment they learned that JFK had been assassinated (Winograd & Killinger, 1983). Laboratory studies have confirmed that individuals are more likely to remember emotional information than neutral information, and often remember more details surrounding the presentation of emotional information as compared to neutral information (Heuer & Reisberg, 1990; Cahill & McGaugh, 1995; Kensinger et al., 2002). The proposed studies examine the neural correlates of this effect, and test the prediction that amygdalar modulation of prefrontal function (critical for encoding of contextual detail) and hippocampal function (critical for binding an item and its context together) underlies the effect.
| Gutchess, Angela H; Kensinger, Elizabeth A; Schacter, Daniel L (2010) Functional neuroimaging of self-referential encoding with age. Neuropsychologia 48:211-9 |
| Giovanello, Kelly S; Kensinger, Elizabeth A; Wong, Alana T et al. (2010) Age-related neural changes during memory conjunction errors. J Cogn Neurosci 22:1348-61 |
| Gutchess, Angela H; Kensinger, Elizabeth A; Schacter, Daniel L (2007) Aging, self-referencing, and medial prefrontal cortex. Soc Neurosci 2:117-33 |
| Gutchess, Angela H; Kensinger, Elizabeth A; Yoon, Carolyn et al. (2007) Ageing and the self-reference effect in memory. Memory 15:822-37 |
| Kensinger, Elizabeth A; Schacter, Daniel L (2007) Remembering the specific visual details of presented objects: neuroimaging evidence for effects of emotion. Neuropsychologia 45:2951-62 |
| Kensinger, Elizabeth A; Schacter, Daniel L (2006) Reality monitoring and memory distortion: effects of negative, arousing content. Mem Cognit 34:251-60 |
| Kensinger, Elizabeth A; Schacter, Daniel L (2006) Amygdala activity is associated with the successful encoding of item, but not source, information for positive and negative stimuli. J Neurosci 26:2564-70 |
| Kensinger, Elizabeth A; Schacter, Daniel L (2006) Neural processes underlying memory attribution on a reality-monitoring task. Cereb Cortex 16:1126-33 |
| Kensinger, Elizabeth A; Krendl, Anne C; Corkin, Suzanne (2006) Memories of an emotional and a nonemotional event: effects of aging and delay interval. Exp Aging Res 32:23-45 |
| Kensinger, Elizabeth A; Schacter, Daniel L (2006) When the Red Sox shocked the Yankees: comparing negative and positive memories. Psychon Bull Rev 13:757-63 |
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