Emotional Modulation of the Interaction Between Related Memories with Functional MRI

In this between-subject functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we investigated different emotional modulations of memory integration by manipulating the valence of stimuli used in an associative memory paradigm. Our study specifies the emotion-induced facilitation and interference effects on two typical types of emotional memory integration, involving distinct dynamical processes of hippocampal trial-specific reactivation and connectivity. We also studied the network dynamics composed of the hippocampus, amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex. Using the dynamic causal modeling framework, our results confirmed the prior findings that introducing emotional stimuli increases hippocampus–amygdala coupling and enhances network connectivity in the neutral–emotional condition. In addition, our analyses revealed the effective connectivity and suggested that the neuronal activity of amygdala may influence the other two regions in the neutral–emotional condition. This collection contains raw behavioral data for all four tasks (Behavior). The raw fMRI data are available for three scanned tasks (FL, EN and SR; MRI_raw). Subject information, including pseudonymized subject numbers, condition, gender, age and reasons for exclusion, is also provided.