Emotion, anxiolysis and memory

✍ Scribed by H. Allain; M. Bourin; J. M. Reymann; D. Bentue-Ferrer; A. Patat; S. Schuck; A. Lieury

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 99 KB
• Volume: 14
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-6222
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1077(199908)14:1+<s80::aid-hup121>3.0.co;2-2

✦ Synopsis

Stress and severe trauma are inprinted on the brain; and memory trace generally privileges highly emotional events. In anxiety disorders, threatening information is selectively encoded and is associated with bias in explicit and implicit recall. On the othe hand, memory disorders (dementia, neurodegenerative pathologies) may be accompanied by emotion control disturbancies. In pharmacology, anxiolytics modify memory performance, whereas psychostimulants can induce anxiety or panic attacks. All these data are an illustration of interdependence between the interactions operating within the limbic system (amydala) and hippocampus, real cross-talk between emotion and memory processes. This paper aims to show that pharmacology could dissociate the speci®c impacts either on emotion or on memory, thus avoiding deleterious side-eects on cognition.