Binding Temporal Context in Memory: Impact of Emotional Arousal as a Function of State Anxiety and State Dissociation.

Rafaële J C Huntjens, Ineke Wessel, Albert Postma, Rineke van Wees-Cieraad, Peter J de Jong

Journal: The Journal of nervous and mental disease 2015;203(7):545-50

PMID: 26057772

Full Text on Ovid Technologies, Inc. View on PubMed

Abstract

Encoding of stressful experiences plays an important role in the development of posttraumatic stress disorder. A crucial aspect of memory encoding is binding: the "gluing" of the temporal and spatial elements of an episode into a cohesive unit. This study investigated the effect of emotional arousal on temporal binding and examined whether temporal binding varied as a function of state anxiety and/or state dissociation. Participants saw picture sequences that varied in arousal and valence. After each sequence, participants were presented with all the pictures simultaneously and had to sort the pictures in the original order. Temporal context binding was indexed by sorting accuracy. Binding was generally lower for high than low arousing pictures. Reduced binding of arousing material was specifically pronounced in participants with high state anxiety, whereas it seemed independent of state dissociation. These findings point to the relevance of impaired temporal binding as a component of aberrant memory encoding in stressful situations.

Address: *Department of Clinical Psychology and Experimental Psychopathology, University of Groningen, Groningen; †Psychological Laboratory, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University; and ‡Department of Neurology, University Medical Centre Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands.

DOI: 10.1097/NMD.0000000000000325

Link outs

Free resources

Medical:

Subscription / membership required

Full Text Sources:

MeSH Terms: Adolescent, Adult, Anxiety Disorders, Arousal, Association Learning, Dissociative Disorders, Emotions, Female, Humans, Individuality, Life Change Events, Male, Mental Recall, Models, Psychological, Pattern Recognition, Visual, Risk Factors, Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic, Students, Time Perception, Young Adult