Stress and Novelty: Two interventions to modulate emotional memory in adolescents

In recent years, there has been great interest in developing minimally invasive strategies to enhance cognitive performance. This work aimed to evaluate the modulating effect of two interventions (stress and novelty, studies 1 and 2, respectively) on the emotional memory of adolescents. The sample included 128 participants aged between 12 and 17 years. The participants in both studies looked at 36 selected neutral and emotional pictures. Simultaneously, they rated the valence and arousal of each image (Acquisition Phase). Then, the adolescents in Study 1 performed a stressful (Experimental Group) or non-stressful (Control Group) task, while those in Study 2 watched a novel (Experimental Group) or non-novel (Control Group) video (Treatment Phase). Immediately afterward, recall and recognition were evaluated (immediate measures). A week later, free recall and recognition were tested again (deferred measures; Assessment Phase). In Study 1, the Experimental Group had better recall than the Control Group on both immediate and deferred measures, while in Study 2, the Experimental Group had better deferred recall for neutral images in comparison with the Control Group. In both studies, emotional images were more activating and better remembered than neutral ones (immediate and deferred tests). These findings suggest that the proposed interventions were beneficial in enhancing certain aspects of memory performance and could, therefore, be employed in different fields, mainly education, given that the intervention is applicable to the school-age population.