Sex-related influences on the neurobiology of emotionally influenced memory

In a recent report, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that "Sex matters. Sex, that is, being male or female, is an important basic human variable that should be considered when designing and analyzing studies in all areas and at all levels of biomedical and health-related research."(1) Recent findings from my laboratory concerning neural mechanisms of emotionally influenced memory further support this conclusion. This article first provides a brief, general overview of sex-related influences on brain and cognition. Upon this background, recent findings from my laboratory and others are described, demonstrating sex-related influences on neural mechanisms underlying emotionally influenced, explicit recall of emotionally arousing events. Both the hemispheric involvement of the human amygdala in memory for emotionally arousing events and the impairing effect of ID-adrenergic blockade on memory for emotional events exhibit pronounced sex-related differences. We interpret both of these effects in the context of evidence indicating hemispheric specialization in the processing of global/wholistic versus local/fine detail aspects of a situation. The more general conclusion that we draw from these investigations is that theories of the neurobiology of emotion and memory must begin to account for the seemingly substantial influences of sex.