impairment of aversive episodic memories during Covid-19 pandemic: The impact of emotional context on memory processes

LEÓN, CANDELA S; BONILLA, MATÍAS; URRETA BENITEZ, FACUNDO; IGNACIO BRUSCO; WANG JINGYI; CECILIA FORCATO

Congreso; Congreso Anual SAN2021; 2021

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias

People´s mental health has deteriorated due to the Covid-19 pandemic, showing higher levels of anxiety and depression which in turn, are emotional variables that can modulate episodic memory processes. There is a general consensus that aversive events are better remembered than neutral ones. Here, we study the effects of increased values ​​of negative mental symptoms on acquisition and consolidation of neutral and aversive episodic memories. For that participants observed a video of a neutral or aversive story and were immediately tested or one week after. Six months later, the same procedure was repeated with a different story, that is, the participants that first received the neutral story, received the aversive one and on the other way round. As expected, the levels of anxiety and depression were significantly increased with respect to the population mean in a normal context. Due to the threatening context of the Pandemic by Covid-19, we expected that the superiority of emotional episodic memories over neutral ones would be lost. However, contrary to our expectations, the aversive content was remembered significantly less than the neutral content at short and long term. Furthermore, regarding the temporal order of the stories, we found that the emotional content was remembered to the same extent as the neutral one. Thus, we suggest that the pandemic context, translated into increases in anxiety and depression could be impairing the encoding of aversive content.