Emotion and Destination Memory in Alzheimer’s Disease

Research shows beneficial effect of emotion on self-related information in patients with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Our paper investigates whether emotion improves destination memory (e.g., did I tell you about the manuscript?), which is thought to be self-related (e.g., did I tell you about the manuscript?). To this aim, twenty-seven AD patients and thirty healthy older adults told 24 neutral facts to eight neutral faces, eight positive faces, and eight negative faces. On a subsequent recognition task, participants had to decide whether they had previously told a given fact to a given face or not. Data revealed no emotional effect on destination memory in AD patients. However, in healthy older adults, better destination memory was observed for negative faces than for positive faces, and the latter memory was better than for neutral faces. The absence of emotional effect on destination memory in AD is interpreted in terms of substantial decline in this memory in the disease.