Cortisol mediates the effects of stress on the contextual dependency of memories.
Stress is known to exert considerable impact on learning and memory processes. Typically, human studies have investigated memory for single items (e.g., pictures, words), but it remains unresolved how exactly stress may alter the storage of memories into their original encoding context (i.e., memory contextualization). Since neurocircuitry underlying memory contextualization processes is sensitive to the well-known stress hormone cortisol, we here investigated whether cortisol mediates stress effects on memory contextualization. Forty healthy young men were randomly assigned to a psychosocial stress or control group. Ten minutes after stress manipulation offset, participants were instructed to learn and remember neutral and negative words, each of which was depicted against a unique background picture. Approximately 24h later, memory was tested by means of cued retrieval and recognition tasks. To assess memory contextualization half of the words were tested in intact item-contexts pairs, and half in rearranged item-context combinations. Recognition data showed that cortisol, but no other indices of stress such as heart rate or subjective stress, mediated the effects of stress on contextualization of neutral and negative memories. The mediation analysis further showed that stress resulted in increases in cortisol and that cortisol was positively related to memory contextualization, but unrelated to other measures of memory. Thus, there seems to be a specific role for cortisol in the integration of a central memory into its surrounding context.
Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Department of Clinical Psychology, Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Electronic address: v.vanast@donders.ru.nl.
Vanessa A
VA
van Ast
Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology, Rudolf Magnus Institute of Neuroscience, UMC Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Sandra
S
Cornelisse
Department of Cognitive Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Martijn
M
Meeter
Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Merel
M
Kindt
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001794:Blood Pressure / Q000502:physiology; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D006854:Hydrocortisone / Q000378:metabolism / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D011897:Random Allocation; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D012463:Saliva / Q000378:metabolism; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000378:metabolism / Q000503:physiopathology*; D055815:Young Adult; D000516:alpha-Amylases / Q000378:metabolism
D000516:alpha-Amylases; D006854:Hydrocortisone
Consolidation; Context; Cortisol; Emotion; Encoding; Memory; Post-traumatic stress disorder; Recognition; Stress; Trier social stress test