Drawbacks to Strengthening Neural Salience Encoding: A Link Between Cortisol and Risky Drinking

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Endocrinology

Background:

• Emotionally salient experiences are remembered more strongly, influenced by hormones like cortisol.
• This enhanced memory encoding can impact future behavior, but the link to amplified salience is unclear.
• Risky alcohol consumption is associated with heightened salience responses, memory, and cortisol levels.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the link between amplified salience encoding, cortisol, memory bias, and subsequent alcohol motivation.
• To explore how cortisol affects memory and brain responses to alcohol cues in social drinkers.
• To determine if sensitized salience responses predict memory biases and alcohol motivation.

Main Methods:

• Employed a double-blind, cross-over pharmacological design.
• Integrated functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), cognitive, and motivation assays.
• Studied healthy male and female social drinkers across a range of alcohol consumption levels.

Main Results:

• Cortisol enhanced memory for salient alcohol-related events, creating a memory bias.
• This memory bias was associated with increased motivation for alcohol consumption.
• Risky drinkers showed amplified cortisol effects on brain salience responses to alcohol, predicting memory biases and motivation.

Conclusions:

• Cortisol's enhancement of memory for salient alcohol cues contributes to increased alcohol motivation.
• Sensitized salience responses, particularly in risky drinkers, mediate the link between cortisol, memory, and alcohol-seeking behavior.
• These findings reveal maladaptive consequences of enhanced salience encoding in the context of alcohol use.