Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease 36 (2013) 535–544 DOI 10.3233/JAD-130170 IOS Press 535 Effects of Emotionally-Rated Material on Visual Memory in Alzheimer’s Disease in Relation to Medial Temporal Atrophy Lionel Landr´ e a , Alina-Alexandra Sava a , Alexandre Krainik b , Laurent Lamalle b , Pierre Krolak-Salmon c and Hanna Chainay a,∗ a Laboratoire EMC (EA 3082), Universit´ e Lyon 2 Lumi` ere, Bron, France b CHU de Grenoble, Service de Neuroimagerie, La Tronche, France c Hˆ opital G´ eriatrique des Charpennes, Villeurbanne, France Accepted 4 April 2013 Abstract. Emotional material tends to be better retrieved in memory than neutral material. This emotional enhancement of memory may be related to the attentional effects of the amygdala’s response to emotional stimuli. Because early neuropathological changes in Alzheimer’s disease involve the amygdala and the hippocampus, it has been suggested that this effect is impaired in patients. However inconsistent results have been reported. The goal of our study was to evaluate the effects of emotion on picture recognition in patients affected by Alzheimer’s disease, and to explore the link between this effect and the degree of amygdalar and hippocampal atrophy. Mild Alzheimer’s disease patients (n = 15) and control participants (n = 20) performed an Old/New recognition task using pictures of negative, neutral, and positive emotional valence. Automated segmentation of their high-resolution T1 MRI scans was performed in order to obtain amygdalar and hippocampal volumes. Correlation analyses were then performed between volumetric data, memory, and the emotional effect on memory. An effect of emotion on memory was found for control participants (with positive items being better recognized than neutral and negative ones), with no correlation between this effect and medial temporal volumes, and a significant correlation between overall recognition scores and hippocampal volumes. Conversely, no emotional effect on memory was found across the group of patients; however, significant correlations were found between the loss of this effect and amygdalar and hippocampal volumes. These results tend to confirm a link between the loss of emotional effect on memory and neuropathological change in medial temporal structures during the course of Alzheimer’s disease. Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease, amygdala, emotions, hippocampus, memory, MRI INTRODUCTION In young healthy participants, emotional informa- tion is usually better retrieved in memory than emo- tionally neutral information (see [1]). This emotional enhancement of memory (EEM) effect is supposed to be related to the amygdala’s activity, through its role in ∗ Correspondence to: Hanna Chainay, PhD, Laboratoire EMC, universit´ e Lyon 2 Lumi` ere, bˆ atiment K, 5 avenue Pierre Mend` es, 69500 Bron, France. Tel.: +33 4 78 77 43 52; Fax: +33 4 78 77 43 51; E-mail: hanna.chainay@univ-lyon2.fr. both stronger attentional focus on emotional informa- tion at encoding [2], and its influence on the subsequent consolidation processes of emotional memories [3]. These phenomena may be due to the amygdala’s important structural and functional connectivity to the hippocampus (considered as a central structure for episodic memory encoding, consolidation, and retrieval), allowing amygdalar emotional response to modulate hippocampal memory-related processes. During normal aging, the memory advantage for emotionally-positive information is broadly preserved, though the effect of emotionally-negative material on ISSN 1387-2877/13/$27.50 © 2013 – IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved