Human Cerebellum and Corticocerebellar Connections Involved in Emotional Memory Enhancement

Emotional information is better remembered than neutral information. Extensive evi-dence indicates that the amygdala and its interactions with other cerebral regions play an important role in the memory-enhancing effect of emotional arousal. While the cere-bellum has been found to be involved in fear conditioning, its role in emotional enhancement of episodic memory is less clear. To address this issue, we used a whole -brain functional MRI approach in 1,418 healthy participants. First, we identified clus-ters significantly activated during enhanced memory encoding of negative and positive emotional pictures. In addition to the well-known emotional memory-related cerebral regions, we identified a cluster in the cerebellum. We then used dynamic causal model-ing and identified several cerebellar connections with increased connection strength cor-responding to enhanced emotional memory, including one to a cluster covering the amygdala and hippocampus, and bidirectional connections with a cluster covering the anterior cingulate cortex. The present findings indicate that the cerebellum is an inte-gral part of a network involved in emotional enhancement of episodic memory.