Why we remember emotional events with an increased subjective sense of remembering (SSR) is unclear. SSR for neutral events is linked to memory for various kinds of details. Using the Remember/Know paradigm, participants provided written justifications of their Remember responses indicating what they specifically recollected about a negative or…

Research suggests that sleep preferentially consolidates the negative aspects of memories at the expense of the neutral aspects. However, the mechanisms by which sleep facilitates this emotional memory trade-off remain unknown. Although active processes associated with sleep-dependent memory consolidation have been proposed to underlie this…

Clinical research has linked post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with deficits in fear extinction. However, it is not clear whether these deficits result from stress-related changes in the acquisition or retention of extinction or in the regulation of extinction memories by context, for example. In this study, we used the single prolonged stress…

The interaction between amygdala-driven and hippocampus-driven activities is expected to explain why emotion enhances episodic memory recognition. However, overwhelming behavioral evidence regarding the emotion-induced enhancement of immediate and delayed episodic memory recognition has not been obtained in humans. We found that the recognition…

Do our memories remain static during sleep, or do they change? We argue here that memory change is not only a natural result of sleep cognition, but further, that such change constitutes a fundamental characteristic of declarative memories. In general, declarative memories change due to retrieval events at various times after initial learning and…

Human brain imaging studies have shown that greater amygdala activation to emotional relative to neutral events leads to enhanced episodic memory. Other studies have shown that fearful faces also elicit greater amygdala activation relative to neutral faces. To the extent that amygdala recruitment is sufficient to enhance recollection, these…

Just a little over a century has passed since Muller and Pilzecker (1900) proposed the "perseveration-consolidation" hypothesis suggesting that neural activity initiated by newly learned information perseverates for a while and that such perseveration is critical for consolidating memory. Although memory consolidation is currently the focus of…