title: Relationship between the number of life events and memory capacity in children.
abstract: Stressful life events can result into declined memory performance at later age. One hypothesis suggests that stress affects the hippocampus, a brain area important for memory functioning. This study explored a potential relationship between the number of negative stressful life events and hippocampus-dependent declarative but not hippocampus-independent procedural memory performance in a community sample of 255 children, aged 6-12 years. The findings revealed that negative stressful life events were negatively related to verbal declarative memory, but not to nonverbal declarative and procedural memory. The memory impairments could not be accounted for by attention and sleep disturbances, and parenting characteristics as perceived by the child did not influence the vulnerability for the stress-related memory impairments. These findings provide further insight into the deleterious effects of negative stressful life events on learning in school-aged children.
authors: Department of Clinical Child and Adolescent Studies, Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands. kbheijden@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
authors: Kristiaan B
authors: KB
authors: van der Heijden
authors: Jill
authors: J
authors: Suurland
authors: Hanna
authors: H
authors: Swaab
authors: Leo M J
authors: LM
authors: de Sonneville
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D008569:Memory Disorders / Q000150:complications* / Q000523:psychology*; D009426:Netherlands; D016487:Parenting / Q000523:psychology; D012424:Rural Population / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D012890:Sleep; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000150:complications* / Q000523:psychology*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014505:Urban Population / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D014706:Verbal Learning