Journal
BIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 76, Issue 1-2, Pages 116-123Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2007.07.001
Keywords
acute stress; glucocorticoids (GCs); trier social stress test (TSST); context; declarative memory
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Studies on how acute stress affects learning and memory have yielded inconsistent findings, with some studies reporting enhancing effects while others report impairing effects. Recently, Joels et al. [Jowls, M., Pu, Z., Wiegert, O., Oitzl, M.S., Krugers, H.J., 2006. Learning under stress: how does it work? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 152-158] argued that stress will enhance memory only when the memory acquisition phase and stressor share the same spatiotemporal context (i.e., context-congruency). The current study tested this hypothesis by looking at whether context-congruent stress enhances declarative memory performance. Undergraduates were assigned to a personality, stress group (n = 16), a memory stress group (n = 18), or a no-stress control group (n = 18). While being exposed to the acute stressor or a control task, participants encoded personality and memory-related words and were tested for free recall 24 h later. Relative to controls, stress significantly enhanced recall of context-congruent words, but only for personality words. This suggests that acute stress may strengthen the consolidation of memory material when the stressor matches the to-be-remembered information in place and time. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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