THE IMPORTANCE OF A SYNCHRONY BETWEEN EMOTION AND MEMORY – CASES WITH DISSOCIATIVE AMNESIA

Abstract

"Episodic or episodic-autobiographical memory is considered to be a significant attribute of human cognition, depending on autonoetic consciousness and allowing mental time travel into past and future. Furthermore, episodic memory is embedded in an appraisal system, in which individual episodes are evaluated. We used patients with a condition of ‘dissociative amnesia’ in order to study interdependencies between emotion and memory. Dissociative amnesia leads to a blockade of retrieving episodic memories, while the retrieval of general knowledge (“semantic memory”) is still possible usually. Forty-one patients with a diagnosis of dissociative amnesia were investigated neuropsychologically. Sixteen of them were subjected to fluor-positron-emission-tomography to study possible changes in their brain. Main questions were (a) in what ways their old – “forgotten” – memories differ from newly acquired ones, and (b) what are possible brain mechanisms leading to the dichotomy between emotional and non-emotional memory retrieval, respectively failure of retrieval. Results indicate that the forgotten or blocked personal memories are much more complex and self-centered than the semantic ones and require more effort for retrieval. Furthermore, blocked memories seem to remain in a subconscious, disconnected state, hindering the proper association between cognition and emotion. It was found that the failure of episodic retrieval is accompanied by a dysfunction or desynchronization between emotion- and fact-processing regions of the brain."