Stress Hormones Strengthen Emotional Memories
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Cortisol and Emotional Memory: How Stress Shapes Our Brains
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How Cortisol Builds Emotional Memories
A new study investigates how cortisol, a stress-related hormone, helps the brain build emotional memories.
Stress influences what we learn and remember. The hormone cortisol, which is released during stressful situations, can make emotional memories in particular stronger. But how exactly dose cortisol help the brain build emotional memories?
In a new study, Yale researchers investigated just that. Specifically, they wanted to know how cortisol acts separately on brain circuits that track emotion and those that track memory.
They found that cortisol not only helped people remember emotional experiences but also enhanced emotional memory by changing the dynamic brain networks associated with both memory and emotion.
“We all experience stress,and my lab is interested in understanding how stress can be helpful,” says corresponding author Elizabeth Goldfarb,an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and of psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
the findings appear in the journal Science Advances.
The Brain’s Emotional Memory Process
While it is known that stress-and cortisol-can help form stronger emotional memories in humans and rodents alike, certain parts of the brain, like the amygdala, are necessary for these benefits. But, because these brain regions can be involved in multiple cognitive processes, it’s been challenging to understand how exactly cortisol helps the brain build emotional memories.
“Forming memories for emotional experiences involves different processes in the brain: first, perceiving an experience as emotional or intense, and second, encoding that experience into long-term memory,” says Goldfarb, who is also a member of Yale’s Wu Tsai Institute, an interdisciplinary research initiative that explores cognition.
Study Methodology
For this study,