The past 15-20 years has witnessed an impressive convergence of animal and human subject studies concerning brain mechanisms storing """"""""emotional memory,"""""""" defined here as explicit memory for emotionally arousing events. Extensive evidence implicates stress hormones and the amygdala as key, interacting components of an endogenous 'memory modulating'mechanism. Our recent research also uncovered significant sex and sex hormone influences on these mechanisms. Here we propose to further investigate the neural underpinnings of emotional memory with a combination of basic and applied studies, broadly divided into 3 parts. The first will investigate sex/stress hormone influences on emotional memory, including in patients deprived of sex hormones for cancer treatment. The second will examine neurohormonal underpinnings of intrusive recollections that occur after emotional events, and examine whether sex hormones influence the development of intrusive recollections in recently traumatized women. The third will utilize a method we have recently developed for selectively disrupting both emotional memory and amygdala effective connectivity (namely, a targeted dose of the anesthetic sevoflurane) to further dissect amygdala contributions to emotional memory in healthy humans. Collectively, these studies should provide broad new insight into neural mechanisms of emotional memory storage, and into sex influences thereto. They should also help minimize the gap that still exists between basic and applied studies of emotional memory.
Research like ours into brain mechanisms of emotional memory, and sex influences on those mechanisms, has immediate, strong relevance for understanding and treating many disorders of emotional memory, most notably Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and clinical depression. Our research involving sex/stress hormone interactions in memory will also help us understand, and treat, the severe memory deficits commonly experienced in cancer patients who are deprived of sex hormones as part of their therapy.
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