Higher post-encoding cortisol benefits the selective consolidation of emotional aspects of memory

Emotional experiences create durable memory traces in the brain, especially when these memories are consolidated in the presence of stress hormones such as cortisol. Although some research suggests cortisol elevation can increase long-term memory for emotional relative to neutral content, the impact of stress and cortisol on the consolidation of emotional and neutral aspects of memories when they are part of the same experience remains unknown. Here, after encoding complex scenes consisting of negative or neutral objects placed on neutral backgrounds, participants were exposed to a psychosocial stressor (or matched control condition) in order to examine the impact of stress and cortisol on early consolidation processes. The next day, once cortisol levels had returned to baseline, specific and gist recognition memory were tested separately for objects and backgrounds. Results indicate that while there was a numerical increase in memory for negative objects in the stress group, higher endogenous cortisol concentrations were specifically associated with decreased memory for the neutral backgrounds originally paired with negative objects. Moreover, across all participants, cortisol levels were positively correlated with the magnitude of the emotional memory trade-off effect. Specifically, while memory for negative objects was preserved, elevated cortisol during early consolidation was associated with decreased memory for neutral backgrounds that were initially paired with negative objects. These memory effects were observed in both the stricter specific measure of memory and the less conservative measure of gist memory. Together, these findings suggest that rather than influencing all aspects of an experience similarly, elevated cortisol during early consolidation selectively preserves what is most emotionally salient and adaptive to remember while allowing the loss of memory for less important neutral information over time.