title: The impact of different emotional states on the memory for what, where and when features of specific events.
abstract: Emotions can modulate the encoding and recollection of personal events. In the present study, we investigated the effects of different emotional states (pleasant, neutral or anxious) on episodic memory formation in a virtual reality (VR) setting. Emotional states were induced by pleasant, neutral or anxiety-inducing movie clips prior to the presentation of specific events in a VR scenario. Episodic memory performance of healthy participants in whom an anxious emotional state had been induced was inferior to those of the neutral and pleasant conditions. In the anxious condition, participants were particularly impaired regarding their memory for the location of events. A correlational analysis indicated that high levels of negative arousal were associated with poor memory for the temporal and spatial context of events. In contrast, high levels of happiness were associated with better memory for the spatial context of events. Our data provide evidence that emotional arousal can modulate memory for what happened, where and when.
authors.affiliation: Mental Health Research and Treatment Center, Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany. Electronic address: armin.zlomuzica@rub.de.
authors.forename: Armin
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Zlomuzica
authors.affiliation: Mental Health Research and Treatment Center, Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Friederike
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Preusser
authors.affiliation: Mental Health Research and Treatment Center, Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Christina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Totzeck
authors.affiliation: UFR des Sciences de la Vie (927), Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France; Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine, Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Ekrem
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Dere
authors.affiliation: Mental Health Research and Treatment Center, Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Jürgen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Margraf
mesh_terms: D001007:Anxiety; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D011581:Psychological Tests; D011897:Random Allocation; D065852:Spatial Memory; D013998:Time Perception; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Anxiety disorders; Emotions; Episodic memory; Item source memory; Stressor-related disorders; What-where-when task