CCN Colloquium: "The Independent and Interactive Effects of Stress and Sleep on Emotional Memory Formation"

Dr. Payne's research focuses on how sleep and stress influence human memory and psychological function.

Elevated stress hormones (e.g., cortisol and norepinephrine) can selectively benefit emotional memory formation, as can the occurrence of sleep shortly after learning. I will discuss evidence, from behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging studies, suggesting that stress and arousal interact with sleep to augment memory consolidation, particularly for emotionally negative information, as well as how these relationships might change with age. I will present a model arguing that stress hormones help 'tag' emotional information as important to remember at the time of encoding, thus enabling subsequent, sleep-based plasticity processes to optimally consolidate emotional information in a selective manner.