Emotion, anxiolysis and memory

Stress and severe trauma are inprinted on the brain; and memory trace gener ally privileges highly emotional events. In anxiety disorders, threatening information is selectively encoded and is associated with bias in explicit and implicit recall. On the othe hand, memory disorders (dementia, neurodeg enerative pathologies) may be accompanied by emotion control disturbancies. In pharmacology, anxiolytics modify memory performance, whereas psychostim ulants can induce anxiety or panic attacks. All these data are an illustrat ion of interdependence between the interactions operating within the limbic system (amydala) and hippocampus, real cross-talk between emotion and memo ry processes. This paper aims to show that pharmacology could dissociate th e specific impacts either on emotion or on memory, thus avoiding deleteriou s side-effects on cognition. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.