Recognition memory for emotional pictures in Alzheimer's patients Emotionally meaningful events as a general rule are more easily remembered than events devoid of emotional content. One explanation for this is that the amygdala is activated. This mesial structure of the temporal lobe seems to regulate the aective component of memory, bringing forth emotional signi®cance to episodes to be remembered (1). Several lines of evidence point to this direction: results, both from animal experiments and human studies, implicate the amygdala in anxiety proces- ses and conditioned fear (for a review, see 2); recently, it was reported that an Urbach±Wiethe disease patient with bilateral amygdaloid damage showed no evidence of enhanced memory after the introduction of emotional events (3); a functional imaging study (4) con®rmed that amygdala acti- vation is involved in this phenomenon. In addition, a number of studies have shown that the amygdala is involved in the recognition of emotions in facial expressions (5±8; but see 9). Neuropathological alterations have been found in the amygdala of patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (AD), including the presence of neuro®brilary tangles and neuritic plaques, the characteristic histologic features of the disease (10, 11). Amygdala atrophy was detected in autopsied patients with advanced AD (12), and also in vivo in patients in the early phase of the disease (13). Given the pathological alterations seen in the amygdala of AD patients, some kind of emotion processing impairment is to be expected in these patients. Indeed, some authors have demonstrated a defective processing of emotional cues in AD patients, including an impairment in the processing of facial expressions (14±16). On the other hand, it was shown that AD patients living in Kobe when the earthquake happened were able to remember this experience with a strong emotional content (17). However, the literature on the processing of emotional information of AD patients has gener- ally overlooked the eects of emotional content of stimuli on memory. In this study we examined whether AD patients can bene®t from the emotional content of visual stimuli in a picture recognition test. In normal subjects it was expected that aectively loaded pictures would be recognized better than neutral stimuli, but in AD patients, on the contrary, the aective content of stimuli should not facilitate Abrisqueta-Gomez J, Bueno OFA, Oliveira MGM, Bertolucci PHF. Recognition memory for emotional pictures in Alzheimer's patients. Acta Neurol Scand 2002: 105: 51±54. Ó Munksgaard 2002. Objective ± The purpose of the present study was to examine whether Alzheimer's Disease (AD) patients can bene®t from the emotional content of visual stimuli in a picture recognition test. Method ± Sixteen patients with AD and 19 normal controls matched for age and years of education, were studied. Sixteen pictures (with varying emotional contents) were presented to each participant. Thirty minutes later, a recognition test was applied with the target-pictures mixed among 34 others of similar content. The subjects were instructed to rate them as pleasant, unpleasant or indierent. Results ± The total of pictures correctly recognized by the AD patients (75.4% of the target-pictures) was smaller than that of the controls (96.4%). Controls recognized more emotional pictures than indierent pictures. Conclusions ± Emotional content enhanced recognition of pictures in normal subjects, whereas for the Alzheimer's subjects the emotional signi®cance attached to the pictures was of no bene®t to enhance recognition. J. Abrisqueta-Gomez 1 , O. F. A. Bueno 1 , M. G. M. Oliveira 1 , P. H. F. Bertolucci 2 1 Department of Psychobiology, UNIFESP-EPM So Paulo, SP, Brazil; 2 Department of Neurology, UNIFESP- EPM, So Paulo, SP, Brazil Key words: Alzheimer; memory; amnesia; emotion O. F. A. Bueno, Department of Psychobiology, Univer- sidade Federal de So Paulo (UNIFESP-EPM), Rua Napoleo de Barros, 925, CEP 04024 002, So Paulo, SP, Brazil Tel.: (5511) 5539 0155 Fax: (5511) 5572 5092 e-mail: mgabi@psicobio.epm.br Accepted for publication June 13, 2001 Acta Neurol Scand 2002: 105: 51±54 Printed in UK. All rights reserved Copyright Ó Munksgaard 2002 ACTA NEUROLOGICA SCANDINAVICA ISSN 0001-6314 51