Emotional memory in patients with agoraphobic panic disorder compared to a control group

OBJECTIVES: Rational minds make logical connections between cause and effect, whereas emotional minds make no such distinctions, following instinctive logic. This paper investigates episodic emotional memory in patients with panic disorder with agoraphobia in comparison to a control group. METHOD: Sixty volunteers, 30 patients with panic disorder with agoraphobia and 30 healthy controls were exposed to the same slideshow of 11 slides, but randomly exposed to two different narrated versions, namely one emotional and one neutral. Each group of 30 participants was randomly subdivided into two subgroups of 15; each subgroup of patients and controls was exposed either to the emotional or to the neutral narrative. One week later patients and controls returned to answer questionnaires about the slides and respective narrated stories. RESULTS: Panic disorder patients exposed to the emotional content of the story showed a significantly enhanced emotional memory, evidenced by a better recollection of the emotional narration when compared to patients exposed to the neutral version. Compared to controls, panic disorder patients exhibited greater discrepancy between the emotional versus the neutral narrative. CONCLUSION: Results showed that the panic disorder patients were significantly impacted by the content of the emotional version of the story, with respect to their emotional memory; the same was not observed for the control group exposed to the same emotional version of the story. We conclude that the characteristics of the panic disorder condition had an influence on emotional memory.