The impact of mental health symptoms on relational memory performance

Broad memory challenges arise for people with clinically diagnosed mental health disorders, in part due to changes in hippocampal structure and/or function. However, individuals with mental health symptoms often show memory impairments, even when symptoms do not reach the level of a formal clinical diagnosis. Building on this, the present study examined how mental health symptoms influence performance on two relational memory tasks known to be critically dependent on hippocampal function. Participants from across the adult lifespan completed a transverse patterning task for which they learned directional relations among abstract objects. In a separate experiment, participants completed a transitivity task in which they learned relations between pairs of objects and subsequently made inferences across those pairs. All participants completed the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-42). Results showed that individuals with greater symptoms of anxiety performed less accurately on both relational tasks, although this association was only marginal in the transitivity task. Greater symptoms of depression were associated with accuracy declines on both tasks, but only when greater stress levels accompanied depressive symptoms. In the transitivity task, additional interactions emerged between anxiety and both stress and depression, indicating that performance declines were exacerbated by co-occurring symptoms. Generally, older participants performed less accurately; however, in transitivity, these effects emerged primarily in those with accompanying stress and depression. These findings demonstrate that even subclinical levels of depression, anxiety, and stress are associated with memory impairments, suggesting that mental health may play a role in cognitive and brain health across the lifespan.