Name: brain imaging investigation of the neural correlates of emotional autobiographical recollection
Uploaded: 2011-08-26T12:15:00
Description: Watch this Scientific Journal Video about Brain Imaging Investigation of the Neural Correlates of Emotional Autobiographical Recollection at JoVE.com

This research was supported by a Young Investigator Award from the US National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression and a CPRF Award from the Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation (to FD). ED was supported by a Wyeth-CIHR Post-Doctoral Fellowship. The authors wish to thank Peter Seres for assistance with fMRI data collection and Kristina Suen for assistance with data analysis.

1. Collection and Selection of Memories, Imaged Task, and Experimental Protocol
Collection of the Emotional AMs
<ol>
 <li>Personal memories are elicited from each participant during an interview performed prior to the fMRI session, similar to the procedure employed for non-emotional AMs (e.g., 11, 12). Unlike most previous techniques, our AMQ is specifically constructed to target the assessment of emotional personal episodes and their recollective properties. A commonly used method i...

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The experimental design introduced here allows investigation of the neural correlates of remembering emotional autobiographical memories. This design has the potential to advance our knowledge of how the brain generates affective biases (positive or negative) in remembering personal memories, and how those biases may be modulated by the retrieval focus (on emotional or non-emotional aspects). This protocol has additional benefits in that it can also be used with clinical populations (e.g., in patients with depression and...

brain imaging investigation of the neural correlates of emotional autobiographical recollection

Recollection of emotional autobiographical memories (AMs) is important to healthy cognitive and affective functioning 1 - remembering positive AMs is associated with increased personal well-being and self-esteem 2, whereas remembering and ruminating on negative AMs may lead to affective disorders 3. Although significant progress has been made in understanding the brain mechanisms underlying AM retrieval in general (reviewed in 4, 5), less is known about the effect of emotion on the subjective re-experience of AMs and the associated neural correlates. This is in part due to the fact that, unlike the investigations of the emotion effect on memory for laboratory-based microevents (reviewed in 6, 7-9), often times AM studies do not have a clear focus on the emotional aspects of remembering personal events (but see 10). Here, we present a protocol that allows investigation of the neural correlates of recollecting emotional AMs using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Cues for these memories are collected prior to scanning by means of an autobiographical memory questionnaire (AMQ), therefore allowing for proper selection of emotional AMs based on their phenomenological properties (i.e., intensity, vividness, personal significance). This protocol can be used in healthy and clinical populations alike.

Watch this Scientific Journal Video about Brain Imaging Investigation of the Neural Correlates of Emotional Autobiographical Recollection at JoVE.com

Brain Imaging Investigation of the Neural Correlates of Emotional Autobiographical Recollection

We present a protocol that allows investigation of the neural correlates of recollecting emotional autobiographical memories, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. This protocol can be used with both healthy and clinical participants.

Recollection of emotional autobiographical memories (AMs) is important to healthy cognitive and affective functioning 1 - remembering positive AMs is ...

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