Effects of aging and encoding instructions on emotion-induced memory trade-offs

The effects of emotion on memory are often described in terms of trade-offs: People often remember central, emotional information at the expense of background details. The present experiment examined the effects of aging and encoding instructions on participants' ability to remember the details of central emotional objects and the backgrounds on which those objects were placed. When young and older adults passively viewed scenes, both age groups showed strong emotion-induced trade-offs. They were able to remember the visual details as well as the general theme of the emotional object, but they had difficulties remembering the visual specifics of the scene background. Age differences emerged, however, when participants were given encoding instructions that emphasized elaborative encoding of the entire scene. With these instructions, young adults overcame the trade-offs (i.e., they no longer showed impairing effects of emotion), whereas older adults continued to show good memory for the emotional object but poor memory for its background. These results suggest that aging impairs the ability to flexibly disengage attention from the negative arousing elements of scenes, preventing the successful encoding of nonemotional aspects of the environment.     

Ageing and feature binding in visual working memory: The role of presentation time

A large body of research has clearly demonstrated that healthy ageing is accompanied by an associative memory deficit. Older adults exhibit disproportionately poor performance on memory tasks requiring the retention of associations between items (e.g., pairs of unrelated words). In contrast to this robust deficit, older adults’ ability to form and temporarily hold bound representations of an object's surface features, such as colour and shape, appears to be relatively well preserved. However, the findings of one set of experiments suggest that older adults may struggle to form temporary bound representations in visual working memory when given more time to study objects. However, these findings were based on between-participant comparisons across experimental paradigms. The present study directly assesses the role of presentation time in the ability of younger and older adults to bind shape and colour in visual working memory using a within-participant design. We report new evidence that giving older adults longer to study memory objects does not differentially affect their immediate memory for feature combinations relative to individual features. This is in line with a growing body of research suggesting that there is no age-related impairment in immediate memory for colour-shape binding.     

The effect of ageing on the recollection of emotional and neutral pictures

This study investigated age-related differences in recognition memory for emotional and neutral pictures. Younger and older participants were asked to rate pictures according to their emotional valence, arousal, and visual complexity. Two weeks later they had to recognise these pictures and the states of awareness associated with memory were assessed with the "remember/know/guess" paradigm. We found that, although the influence of emotion on recognition accuracy (as assessed by d') was similar in both age groups, the tendency for positive and negative pictures to create a rich recollective experience was weaker in older adults. In addition, "remember" responses were more often based on a recollection of emotional reactions in older than in younger participants. We suggest that the elderly tend to focus on their feelings when confronted with emotional pictures, which could have impaired their memory for the contextual information associated with these stimuli.     

The effects of emotion on younger and older adults’ monitoring of learning

Age-related differences in memory monitoring appear when people learn emotional words. Namely, younger adults’ judgments of learning (JOLs) are higher for positive than neutral words, whereas older adults’ JOLs do not discriminate between positive versus neutral words. In two experiments, we evaluated whether this age-related difference extends to learning positive versus neutral pictures. We also evaluated the contribution of two dimensions of emotion that may impact younger and older adults’ JOLs: valence and arousal. Younger and older adults studied pictures that were positive or neutral and either high or low in arousal. Participants made immediate JOLs and completed memory tests. In both experiments, the magnitude of older adults’ JOLs was influenced by emotion, and both younger and older adults demonstrated an emotional salience effect on JOLs. As important, the magnitude of participants’ JOLs was influenced by valence, and not arousal. Emotional salience effects were also evident on participants’ free recall, and older adults recalled as many pictures as did younger adults. Taken together, these data suggest that older adults do not have a monitoring deficit when learning positive (vs. neutral) pictures and that emotional salience effects on younger and older adults’ JOLs are produced more by valence than by arousal.     

The effect of ageing on the recollection of emotional and neutral pictures

This study investigated age-related differences in recognition memory for emotional and neutral pictures. Younger and older participants were asked to rate pictures according to their emotional valence, arousal, and visual complexity. Two weeks later they had to recognise these pictures and the states of awareness associated with memory were assessed with the “remember/know/guess” paradigm. We found that, although the influence of emotion on recognition accuracy (as assessed by d′) was similar in both age groups, the tendency for positive and negative pictures to create a rich recollective experience was weaker in older adults. In addition, “remember” responses were more often based on a recollection of emotional reactions in older than in younger participants. We suggest that the elderly tend to focus on their feelings when confronted with emotional pictures, which could have impaired their memory for the contextual information associated with these stimuli.     

Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory

As people get older, they experience fewer negative emotions. Strategic processes in older adults' emotional attention and memory might play a role in this variation with age. Older adults show more emotionally gratifying memory distortion for past choices and autobiographical information than younger adults do. In addition, when shown stimuli that vary in affective valence, positive items account for a larger proportion of older adults' subsequent memories than those of younger adults. This positivity effect in older adults' memories seems to be due to their greater focus on emotion regulation and to be implemented by cognitive control mechanisms that enhance positive and diminish negative information. These findings suggest that both cognitive abilities and motivation contribute to older adults' improved emotion regulation.     

Effects of emotion on item and source memory in young and older adults

Emotional experiences are easier to remember than neutral ones, but whether memory for all aspects of an experience is improved by emotion remains unclear. Some researchers have argued that the influence of emotion on memory is different for item than for source information, whereas others have argued that emotion affects both similarly. Also, whether item and source memory are affected by emotion in older people in the same way as in young people is currently unclear. We examined item and source memory for emotional and neutral materials in young and older adults. Memory for emotional items was superior to memory for neutral items, whereas there was no difference in source memory. Overall, item and source memory were poorer in older people than in young people, but emotion seemed to have a similar effect on both age groups. Although emotional content was remembered better than neutral content, this benefit did not apply to source memory. However, varying the emotionality of the source (i.e., the voice in Experiment 3) improved memory for the source, and this effect was greater in young than in older people. Tone of voice had no effect on item memory in older people, but the effect was variable in the young and may depend on the extent to which the tone of voice moderates the interpretation of the content.     

Anger management: age differences in emotional modulation of visual processing

Although positive and negative images enhance the visual processing of young adults, recent work suggests that a life-span shift in emotion processing goals may lead older adults to avoid negative images. To examine this tendency for older adults to regulate their intake of negative emotional information, the current study investigated age-related differences in the perceptual boost received by probes appearing over facial expressions of emotion. Visually-evoked event-related potentials were recorded from the scalp over cortical regions associated with visual processing as a probe appeared over facial expressions depicting anger, sadness, happiness, or no emotion. The activity of the visual system in response to each probe was operationalized in terms of the P1 component of the event-related potentials evoked by the probe. For young adults, the visual system was more active (i.e., greater P1 amplitude) when the probes appeared over any of the emotional facial expressions. However, for older adults, the visual system displayed reduced activity when the probe appeared over angry facial expressions.     

简化的联合再认范式中情绪对错误记忆影响的年龄差异

以康奈尔情绪DRM词表为主要实验材料, 使用简化的联合再认范式(DRM范式的变式), 结合多项式加工树建模的统计手段, 对34名年轻人(23 ± 2岁)和28名老年人(68 ± 5岁)的再认记忆进行比较, 以考察不同年龄组中情绪效价对错误记忆的作用机制。结果发现材料的情绪效价对错误记忆的影响存在显著年龄差异：(1) 积极情绪能够有效降低老年人的错误记忆, 其作用机制为积极情绪增强了老年人的字面痕迹而减弱了要点痕迹提取; (2) 消极情绪能够有效地降低年轻人的错误记忆, 其作用机制为消极情绪使年轻人反应偏向降低, 但不影响其记忆痕迹的提取。结果表明, 简化的联合再认范式下, 情绪效价对错误记忆的效应存在明显的年龄差异：老年人表现出积极情绪降低错误记忆的积极偏向; 年轻人表现出消极情绪降低错误记忆的消极偏向; 情绪效应对错误记忆的认知机制存在年龄差异。     

Do binding deficits account for age-related decline in visual working memory?

Remembering visual material, such as objects, faces, and spatial locations, over a short period of time (seconds) becomes more difficult as we age. We investigated whether these deficits could be explained by a simple reduction in visual working memory capacity or by an impairment in one's ability to form or maintain appropriate associations among pieces of related information. In three experiments, we used recognition and recall tests to address the efficacy with which older adults can create bound object representations by varying the number of features of each object that had to be remembered for a subsequent memory test. Results demonstrated that whereas older adults exhibited reduced memory capacity as compared with that of younger adults, both groups stored integrated object representations in visual working memory. These results are contrasted with other work that suggests that age-related memory decline is due, at least in part, to associative deficits.     

How emotional pictures influence visuospatial binding in short-term memory in ageing and Alzheimer’s disease?

The present study examines the prediction that emotion can facilitate short-term memory. Nevertheless, emotion also recruits attention to process information, thereby disrupting short-term memory when tasks involve high attentional resources. In this way, we aimed to determine whether there is a differential influence of emotional information on short-term memory in ageing and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Fourteen patients with mild AD, 14 healthy older participants (NC), and 14 younger adults (YA) performed two tasks. In the first task, involving visual short-term memory, participants were asked to remember a picture among four different pictures (negative or neutral) following a brief delay. The second task, a binding memory task, required the recognition by participants of a picture according to its spatial location. The attentional cost involved was higher than for the first task. The pattern of results showed that visual memory performance was better for negative stimuli than for neutral ones, irrespective of the group. In contrast, binding memory performance was essentially poorer for the location of negative pictures in the NC group, and for the location of both negative and neutral stimuli in the AD group, in comparison to the YA group. Taken together, these results show that emotion has beneficial effects on visual short-term memory in ageing and AD. In contrast, emotion does not improve their performances in the binding condition.     

The effects of aging and divided attention on memory for item and associative information

The present study examined how aging and divided attention influence memory for item and associative information. Older adults and younger adults working under full-attention conditions and younger adults working under divided-attention conditions studied unrelated word pairs. Memory for item information was measured by later recognition of the 2nd word in the pair, and associative information was measured by recognition of the entire pair. Both older adults in the full-attention condition and younger adults in the divided-attention condition performed more poorly than younger adults in the full-attention condition, with the deficit in associative information being greater than the deficit in item information. In addition, a differentially greater associative decrement was found for the older adults, as shown by their heightened tendency to make false-alarm responses to re-paired (conjunction) distractors. The results are discussed in terms of an age-related reduction in processing resources compounded by an age-related increase in older adults' reliance on familiarity in associative recognition memory.     

Cognitive consequences of expressive regulation in older adults

Previous research has suggested that older and young adults are equally able to regulate their outward expressions of emotion and that the regulation of emotional expression in younger adults results in decreased memory for the emotional stimulus. In the current study, we examined whether older adults show this same memory effect. Older and young adults viewed positive and negative emotional pictures under instructions to view the pictures naturally, enhance their facial expressions, or suppress their facial expressions. Older and young adults showed equivalent outward regulation of expression, but suppressing their emotional expressions led to reduced memory for emotional stimuli only in the young adults. The results suggest that older and young adults are achieving control of their expressions through different mechanisms or strategies.     

Goal-directed memory: the role of cognitive control in older adults' emotional memory

The present study revealed that older adults recruit cognitive control processes to strengthen positive and diminish negative information in memory. In Experiment 1, older adults engaged in more elaborative processing when retrieving positive memories than they did when retrieving negative memories. In Experiment 2, older adults who did well on tasks involving cognitive control were more likely than those doing poorly to favor positive pictures in memory. In Experiment 3, older adults who were distracted during memory encoding no longer favored positive over negative pictures in their later recall, revealing that older adults use cognitive resources to implement emotional goals during encoding. In contrast, younger adults showed no signs of using cognitive control to make their memories more positive, indicating that, for them, emotion regulation goals are not chronically activated.     

The effect of emotion-focused orientation at retrieval on emotional memory in young and older adults

This study examines how emotion-focused orientation at retrieval affects memory for emotional versus neutral images in young and older adults. A total of 44 older adults (ages 61-84 years, M=70.00, SD=5.54) and 43 young adults (ages 17-33 years, M=20.58, SD=3.72) were tested on their free recall and forced-choice recognition of images. At retrieval the emotion-focused orientation was manipulated by instructing participants to focus on emotion-related information (i.e., emotional content of images and the emotional reactions evoked by the images). In the control conditions participants were either instructed to focus on visual information or not provided any specific orientation instruction. In free recall but not forced-choice recognition, the emotion-focused orientation increased young adults' positivity bias and thus wiped out their superior negativity bias. However, the emotion-focused orientation did not affect older adults' emotional memory. The data suggest that young adults activate and prioritise emotional goals in response to external demand during intentional information processing whereas older adults seem to spontaneously tune themselves to emotional goals.     

Memory for positive,negative and neutral events in younger and older adults: Does emotion influence binding in event memory?

When remembering an event, it is important to remember both the features of the event (e.g., a person and an action) and the connections among features (e.g., who performed which action). Emotion often enhances memory for stimulus features, but the relationship between emotion and the binding of features in memory is unclear. Younger and older adults attempted to remember events in which a person performed a negative, positive or neutral action. Memory for the action was enhanced by emotion, but emotion did not enhance the ability of participants to remember which person performed which action. Older adults were more likely than younger adults to make binding errors in which they incorrectly remembered a familiar actor performing a familiar action that had actually been performed by someone else, and this age-related associative deficit was found for both neutral and emotional actions. Emotion not only increased correct recognition of old events for older and younger adults but also increased false recognition of events in which a familiar actor performed a familiar action that had been performed by someone else. Thus, although emotion may enhance memory for the features of an event, it does not increase the accuracy of remembering who performed which action.     

The effect of emotion-focused orientation at retrieval on emotional memory in young and older adults

This study examines how emotion-focused orientation at retrieval affects memory for emotional versus neutral images in young and older adults. A total of 44 older adults (ages 61–84 years, M=70.00, SD=5.54) and 43 young adults (ages 17–33 years, M=20.58, SD=3.72) were tested on their free recall and forced-choice recognition of images. At retrieval the emotion-focused orientation was manipulated by instructing participants to focus on emotion-related information (i.e., emotional content of images and the emotional reactions evoked by the images). In the control conditions participants were either instructed to focus on visual information or not provided any specific orientation instruction. In free recall but not forced-choice recognition, the emotion-focused orientation increased young adults’ positivity bias and thus wiped out their superior negativity bias. However, the emotion-focused orientation did not affect older adults’ emotional memory. The data suggest that young adults activate and prioritise emotional goals in response to external demand during intentional information processing whereas older adults seem to spontaneously tune themselves to emotional goals.     

Younger and older adults’ collaborative recall of shared and unshared emotional pictures

Although a group of people working together recalls more items than any one individual, they recall fewer unique items than the same number of people working apart whose responses are combined. This is known as collaborative inhibition, and it is a robust effect that occurs for both younger and older adults. However, almost all previous studies documenting collaborative inhibition have used stimuli that were neutral in emotional valence, low in arousal, and studied by all group members. In the current experiments, we tested the impact of picture-stimuli valence, picture-stimuli arousal, and information distribution in modulating the magnitude of collaborative inhibition. We included both younger and older adults because there are age differences in how people remember emotional pictures that could modulate any effects of emotion on collaborative inhibition. Results revealed that when information was shared (i.e., studied by all group members), there were robust collaborative inhibition effects for both neutral and emotional stimuli for both younger and older adults. However, when information was unshared (i.e., studied by only a single group member), these effects were attenuated. Together, these results provide mixed support for the retrieval strategy disruption account of collaborative inhibition. Supporting the retrieval strategy disruption account, unshared study information was less susceptible to collaborative inhibition than shared study information. Contradicting the retrieval strategy disruption account, emotional valence and arousal did not modulate the magnitude of collaborative inhibition despite the fact that participants clustered the emotional, but not neutral, information together in memory.     

Age-related decrease in recognition of emotional facial and prosodic expressions

The recognition of nonverbal emotional signals and the integration of multimodal emotional information are essential for successful social communication among humans of any age. Whereas prior studies of age dependency in the recognition of emotion often focused on either the prosodic or the facial aspect of nonverbal signals, our purpose was to create a more naturalistic setting by presenting dynamic stimuli under three experimental conditions: auditory, visual, and audiovisual. Eighty-four healthy participants (women = 44, men = 40; age range 20-70 years) were tested for their abilities to recognize emotions either mono- or bimodally on the basis of emotional (happy, alluring, angry, disgusted) and neutral nonverbal stimuli from voice and face. Additionally, we assessed visual and auditory acuity, working memory, verbal intelligence, and emotional intelligence to explore potential explanatory effects of these population parameters on the relationship between age and emotion recognition. Applying unbiased hit rates as performance measure, we analyzed data with linear regression analyses, t tests, and with mediation analyses. We found a linear, age-related decrease in emotion recognition independent of stimulus modality and emotional category. In contrast, the improvement in recognition rates associated with audiovisual integration of bimodal stimuli seems to be maintained over the life span. The reduction in emotion recognition ability at an older age could not be sufficiently explained by age-related decreases in hearing, vision, working memory, and verbal intelligence. These findings suggest alterations in social perception at a level of complexity beyond basic perceptional and cognitive abilities.     

Self-reference and emotional memory effects in older adults at increased genetic risk of Alzheimer’s disease

The present study investigated whether cognitively healthy older adults who are carriers of the ε4 allele of apolipoprotein E, the most prevalent genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, benefit from self-referential processing and emotional processing to the same degree as noncarriers of this gene. Participants encoded emotional and nonemotional narratives using a baseline-orienting task, semantic elaboration, or imagination-based self-referential processing and then completed a recognition memory test. Both groups of older adults showed enhanced recognition memory for narrative information following self-referential processing relative to semantic elaboration, and the magnitude of this memory effect was not affected by ε4 status. However, older adult ε4 carriers did not show an emotional enhancement effect, whereas older adult ε4 noncarriers did. These results indicate that whereas the self-reference effect is not attenuated in cognitively healthy older adults ε4 carriers, deficits in emotional memory may be an early cognitive marker of abnormal decline.