Emotional memory in schizophrenia

Emotionally arousing scenes are better remembered than neutral ones. The biological basis of this emotional memory effect has been studied in lesion and neuro-imaging studies and depends upon an interaction between the amygdala and medial temporal lobe memory systems including the hippocampus. This study sought to investigate whether patients with schizophrenia had performance deficits on emotional memory tasks consistent with abnormal amygdala function. Patients with schizophrenia and matched control subjects were shown scenes with negative, positive and neutral emotional content. Subjects rated the slides according to how emotionally arousing they found them and then performed surprise memory tests at 10 min (recall) and 3 weeks (recall and recognition). Subjects with schizophrenia did not differ from control subjects in their ratings of the slides. However, patients showed a significant loss of the emotional enhancement of recognition memory for both negative and positive scenes. In addition, patients showed an overall deficit in recall memory, with a selective impairment in recall of the most arousing negative slides. These findings are consistent with the view that medial temporal lobe and in particular amygdala function is abnormal in schizophrenia.