Clinical trial · Research · 19 Oct 2026
In a crossover scan study, a cortisol pill made emotional pictures easier to remember the next day
Source: Yale University / Science Advances
What the research found
Study (human crossover, brain scans). Yuye Huang, Elizabeth V. Goldfarb, and colleagues at Yale report in Science Advances (2025; 11(50); DOI 10.1126/sciadv.adz4143). ScienceDaily recirculated it on 16 Oct 2026. Each participant took hydrocortisone or a placebo, looked at pictures in an MRI scanner, rated how emotional each picture felt, and was tested the next day. The public summary does not give the number of volunteers or their ages. Cortisol improved memory for emotionally significant pictures. In short, about five-second windows of scan data, emotion networks became more consistent and more engaged, memory networks became more specialized for emotional content, and the two networks coordinated more. The same person was scanned under both conditions, double-blind. This is not a reason to take a cortisol product to study. Not medical advice.
Evidence level: Clinical trial. This is among the stronger kinds of evidence, but one study rarely settles a question.
More research news
- In mice, fear made hippocampal maps of a safe place and a dangerous place overlap
- In pregnant mice, immune activation at day 12.5 lined up with placental injury and autism-like traits in male fetuses only
- Support cells in brain tissue from 73 people with Parkinson's showed sex differences in energy-gene and myelin-gene activity
- In 10,362 adults, night-to-night swings in sleep timing lined up with a higher risk of serious cardiovascular events
- In a U.S. telephone survey of 442,906 adults, reported cannabis use lined up with higher odds of cardiovascular disease, especially stroke