Publications by authors named "Eva Loos"
Human cerebellum and corticocerebellar connections involved in emotional memory enhancement.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
October 2022
Emotional information is better remembered than neutral information. Extensive evidence indicates that the amygdala and its interactions with other cerebral regions play an important role in the memory-enhancing effect of emotional arousal. While the cerebellum has been found to be involved in fear conditioning, its role in emotional enhancement of episodic memory is less clear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Recognition memory is an essential ability for functioning in everyday life. Establishing robust brain networks linked to recognition memory performance can help to understand the neural basis of recognition memory itself and the interindividual differences in recognition memory performance.
Methods: We analysed behavioural and whole-brain fMRI data from 1'410 healthy young adults during the testing phase of a picture-recognition task.
The amygdala is critically involved in emotional processing, including fear responses, and shows hyperactivity in anxiety disorders. Previous research in healthy participants has indicated that amygdala activity is down-regulated by cognitively demanding tasks that engage the PFC. It is unknown, however, if such an acute down-regulation of amygdala activity might correlate with reduced fear in anxious participants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMetamemory refers to the ability to monitor and control one´s own memory processes which plays an important role in everyday life when accuracy of memory is required. The present study intends to give new insights into the complex relationship between confidence in memory and accuracy of metamemory judgments for negative emotional and neutral pictorial stimuli. Judgments of learning (JOLs) were investigated in order to provide important theoretical information for practical applications in everyday life.
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- Emotional perception and memory can change throughout the menstrual cycle, but the effects of hormonal contraceptives (HC) on these aspects are less understood.
- In a study of 2,169 healthy young women, HC users rated emotional images as more impactful and recalled them better than those not using HC.
- The connection between HC use and improved memory was partly influenced by how HC users perceived the emotions of the pictures, suggesting a link that could lead to more research on emotional memory and anxiety disorders in women.
Article Synopsis
- Our brains have different areas that help us remember and feel emotions, like happiness or sadness, and these areas work together.
- Researchers studied healthy young adults to see how their brains reacted when looking at pictures that made them feel different emotions and when they tried to remember those pictures later.
- They found specific patterns in brain activity that could predict how strongly someone felt emotions and how well they remembered the pictures, which can help in understanding emotional problems in mental health.
Working memory (WM) is an important cognitive domain for everyday life functioning and is often disturbed in neuropsychiatric disorders. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies in humans show that distributed brain areas typically described as fronto-parietal regions are implicated in WM tasks. Based on data from a large sample of healthy young adults ( = 1369), we applied independent component analysis (ICA) to the WM-fMRI signal and identified two distinct networks that were relevant for differences in individual WM task performance.
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- Increasing age is linked to a decrease in neocortex thickness, with unknown biological mechanisms involved.
- An identified epigenetic signature is associated with cortical thickness and memory performance in healthy young adults, and this effect was replicated in individuals with major depressive disorder.
- The study's findings suggest that specific genes related to the immune system might play a role, and analyzing blood methylation patterns could enhance our understanding of brain-related traits.
Depressive symptoms exist on a continuum, the far end of which is found in depressive disorders. Utilizing the continuous spectrum of depressive symptoms may therefore contribute to the understanding of the biological underpinnings of depression. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) is an important tool for the identification of gene groups linked to complex traits, and was applied in the present study on genome-wide association study (GWAS) data of depression scores and their brain-level structural correlates in healthy young individuals.
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