Citation

Todd RM, Müller DJ, Lee DH, Robertson A, Eaton T, Freeman N, Palombo DJ, Levine B, Anderson AK. Psychol. Sci. 2013; 24(11): 2244-2253.

Affiliation

1Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797613492423

PMID

24058067

Abstract

Emotionally enhanced memory and susceptibility to intrusive memories after trauma have been linked to a deletion variant (i.e., a form of a gene in which certain amino acids are missing) of ADRA2B, the gene encoding subtype B of the α2-adrenergic receptor, which influences norepinephrine activity. We examined in 207 participants whether variations in this gene are responsible for individual differences in affective influences on initial encoding that alter perceptual awareness. We examined the attentional blink, an attentional impairment during rapid serial visual presentation, for negatively arousing, positively arousing, and neutral target words. Overall, the attentional blink was reduced for emotional targets for ADRA2B-deletion carriers and noncarriers alike, which reveals emotional sparing (i.e., reduction of the attentional impairment for words that are emotionally significant). However, deletion carriers demonstrated a further, more pronounced emotional sparing for negative targets. This finding demonstrates a contribution of genetics to individual differences in the emotional subjectivity of perception, which in turn may be linked to biases in later memory.

Language: en