The Emotional Enhancement of Memory in Schizophrenia: The Role of Encoding Strategy

Memory is better for emotionally salient events or materials (emotional enhancement of memory; EEM). Evidence suggests that this memory benefit remains intact in schizophrenia (SCZ), but some inconsistent findings present the need for further study of how and when this process occurs. Here, I examined whether different encoding methods influence the EEM for socially relevant materials in SCZ: emotional facial expressions. SCZ patients and healthy adults encoded faces in two conditions that manipulated attentional focus to promote direct (emotion judgment) or indirect (sex discrimination) processing of emotional content. Based on perception literature, I hypothesized that SCZ patients would show greater EEM effects for faces encoded indirectly. This hypothesis was not supported, and the SCZ group instead showed similar intact EEM to healthy participants in both encoding conditions. Overall, both groups had better memory for angry and fearful faces. These findings have important implications for improving emotional memory function in SCZ.