Séminaire Monika RIEGEL

How emotion and stress influence episodic memory to serve our survival remains a fundamental question for neuroscience research. The gaps in previous research result from several factors, such as: studying stress effects selectively for a certain memory stage, using isolated items without their context,  disregarding the role of different emotions and of specific stress hormones.

In my talk, I will first briefly present my background and my previous work aiming to address these gaps. I focused on two questions: a) How different emotions affect our memory? and b) How emotion affect our memory of complex events and their context of space and time. The main research question of my ongoing project is: c) How a stress hormone cortisol affects the way we remember time (memory), and the way we sense time during a stressful experience (perception).

Last, but not least, I would like to present my idea of a project to be submitted within the ERC Starting Grant 2025 call. Forming lasting memories of emotional and stressful events serve our survival. However, too weak or too strong link of memories with temporal context can be also maladaptive and lie at the core of several mental disorders, including (e.g. anxiety, depression, PTSD). The prevalence of these mental health issues is higher in females. Yet, the effects of emotion and stress on memory have been mostly studied in males. Building on my previous work, I would like address this critical gap in literature and investigate the mechanism of emotion, stress and memory interactions in females. By combining fMRI with pharmacological manipulation and menstrual tracking data, I will investigate how specific stress hormones (cortisol and noradrenaline) across different phases of stress response (acute phase, recovery phase) affect neural mechanisms of memory. Addressing this urgent problem will contribute to our knowledge about women’s health.

Monika Riegel