MEMORY FOR EMOTIONAL WORDS FOLLOWING UNILATERAL TEMPORAL LOBECTOMY

We recently reported that patients who had received unilateral tempora l lobectomy, including the amygdala and hippocampus, show impaired acq uisition in a fear conditioning task (LaBar, LeDoux, Spencer, & Phelps , 1995), indicating a deficit in emotional memory. In the present pape r, we examined performance of these patients on two verbal, emotional memory tasks in an effort to determine the extent of this deficit. In Experiment 1, subjects were asked to recall emotional and non-emotiona l words. In Experiment 2, subjects were asked to recall neutral words which were embedded in emotional and non-emotional sentence contexts. Both temporal lobectomy subjects and normal controls showed enhanced r ecall for emotional words (Experiment 1) and enhanced recall for neutr al words embedded in emotional sentence contexts (Experiment 2). These results suggest that the deficit seen in emotional memory following u nilateral temporal lobectomy is not a global deficit and may be limite d to specific circumstances where emotion influences memory performanc e. Several hypotheses concerning the discrepancy between the present s tudies and the fear conditioning results (LaBar et al., 1995) are disc ussed. (C) 1997 Academic Press.