Emotion-induced retrograde amnesia and trait anxiety

Emotional arousal can both enhance and impair memory. Considering that both emotional memory and trait anxiety (TA) have been associated with adrenergic activity, the authors investigated whether there is an association between 2 opposite emotional memory biases and the TA. The authors used a procedure recently put forward by B. A. Strange, R. Hurlemann, and R. J. Dolan (2003) to elicit an emotion-induced retrograde amnesia (ERA) coupled to an emotional memory enhancement (EME). The authors contrasted the association between these emotional memory biases and the TA in several conditions involving different levels of encoding and types of recall. The results presented here indicated a significant interaction of the TA with EME and ERA and the dependency of these biases on the consciously controlled use of memory.