In 1968, a study demonstrated that consolidated memories can be affected again if they are reactivated. Given the importance of the stress hormones glucocorticoids (GCs) on memory consolidation, the goal of the current study was to assess whether GCs had the capacity to affect a reactivated long-term memory and whether neutral and emotional memories were affected differently. At the first session, participants encoded a movie containing neutral and emotional scenes. Two days later, they recalled the story. Half of them were then exposed to a psychosocial stressor. Memory performance was assessed again right after the stressor and five days later. The stressed group recalled less neutral material five days after the stressor compared to controls. Immediately after the stressor, the stressed group recalled more emotional material than controls. Moreover, this enhanced memory trace was maintained across time. This highlights the importance of minimizing exposure to stressful contexts when reactivating emotional memories.

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This study investigated the neural correlates of memory for human nonlinguistic emotional vocalizations as a function of individual differences in trait anxiety and depression. 20 healthy subjects (female; aged 18-30) free from neurological impairments or psychiatric illness underwent MRI scanning to obtain T1 structural images of their brain, and participated in a subsequent behavioral memory task outside the scanner. Volumetry of the hippocampus and amygdala was performed using a validated protocol. We found emotional vocalizations were better remembered than neutral ones, with performance for negative better than positive. Memory performance for emotional items was associated with hippocampal volume, with no association between memory and I amygdala volume detected. Differences in anxiety or depression had no influence on memory or volume. These results lay the groundwork for future functional neuroimaging work to investigate the neural correlates of memory, personality, and brain structure volume in healthy and clinical populations.

This dissertation presents three experiments designed to demonstrate the effects of cognitive, emotional and psychosocial factors on pain perception in humans and to identify potential neuroanatomical substrates of attentional and emotional pain modulation. / The first two chapters provide an introduction, including the statement of the rationale and objectives of this Ph.D. project (Chapter 1) and an overview of the relevant background literature (Chapter 2). / Chapter 3 presents a voxel-based morphometry study on the neural correlates of attentional and emotional pain modulation. In agreement with the observation that manipulations of emotion and attention differentially affect pain perception, the results of this experiment suggest that separate neuroanatomical substrates may underlie these pain modulations: the right lateral orbitofrontal, left medial prefrontal, and bilateral entorhinal cortices appear to be implicated in emotional pain modulation, while the right putamen appears to be involved in attentional pain modulation. / The study described in Chapter 4 shows that the experimental manipulation of mood using emotionally-laden visual stimuli preferentially alters pain unpleasantness, leaving pain intensity unaffected. This study replicates the psychophysical observations presented in the study of Chapter 3 (and in previous reports), which used odors to manipulate emotional state, therefore suggesting the independence of this phenomenon from the mood induction technique employed. / The study in Chapter 5 shows that empathy has an effect on pain perception as well, which cannot be explained by mood effects. Participants for whom a state of high empathy was evoked rated painful stimuli applied to themselves as more intense and unpleasant than did those in a state of low empathy; furthermore, the state empathy ratings correlated with the pain ratings. / By showing that emotional state, attention and empathy can influence pain perception, the work in this thesis provides evidence demonstrating that the pain experience can be significantly molded by top-down factors, and is therefore far from being solely determined by the physical properties of the noxious stimulation. These observations might partially explain why the pain response in certain situations appears disproportionately large, or surprisingly small, in relation to the noxious stimulation, and support the utility of psychological methods in the management of pain symptoms.

This study was designed to clarify some of the issues surrounding the nature of hemispheric contributions to the processing of emotional and linguistic prosody, as well as to examine the relative contribution of different sensory modalities in processing prosodic structures. Ten healthy young participants were presented with semantically neutral sentences expressing affective or linguistic prosody solely through the use of non-verbal cues (intonation, facial expressions) while undergoing tMRI. The sentences were presented under auditory, visual, as well as audio-visual conditions. The emotional prosody task required participants to identify the emotion of the utterance (happy or angry) and the linguistic prosody task required participants to identify the type of utterance (question or statement). Core peri-sylvian, frontal and occipital areas were activated bilaterally in all conditions suggesting that processing of affective and linguistic prosodic structures is supported by overlapping networks. The strength of these activations may, in part, be modulated by task and modality of presentation.

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