Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

Neural substrate for emotional memory schemas in individuals with childhood adversity

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Xiang-Shen Liu¹ (xiangshen.liu@donders.ru.nl), Janna N. Vrijsen^2,3, Indira Tendolkar^2,4, Guillén Fernández¹, Nils Kohn¹; ¹Radboud University Medical Centre, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, ²Radboud University Medical Centre, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Department of Psychiatry, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, ³Pro Persona Mental Health Care, Depression Expertise Center, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, ⁴LVR-University Hospital Essen, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Medical Faculty, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

Negative memory bias plays an important role in the onset and persistence of depression. Beck's influential Cognitive Model of Depression posits that 'depressive schemas', shaped by childhood adversity, contribute to the development of negative memory bias. Studies in human memory unveiled interactions between the medial prefrontal cortex and the medial temporal lobe as possible neural mechanisms underlying schema memory effects, providing new perspectives to explore Beck's model. Our project aims to investigate whether schema-related neural activity contributes to negative memory bias and how this relates to childhood adversity. Our ongoing MRI study intends to include 100 participants (healthy and subclinical populations) with diverse levels of childhood adversity and depressive symptoms. During scanning, participants are first exposed to either sad music, designed to activate negative schemas through mood induction, or neutral music as a control condition, followed by the encoding of 180 emotional pictures; memory is assessed through a recognition test 24 hours after each encoding session. Preliminary analysis of 64 participants shows schema activation effectively elicits negative emotions. Analysis of the memory data via linear mixed models indicate that childhood adversity negatively predicts positive and neutral memory but not negative memory. Data collection will be finalized in December 2024, allowing us to present findings for the full sample, with a focus on neuroimaging data, at the CNS conference. Through this project, we hope to deepen theoretical insights into schema-based emotional memory and their underlying neural mechanisms, which could have potential applications in clinical fields.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic