老年人情绪记忆中的积极效应及其产生机制

有关情绪与记忆的研究发现, 老年人经常表现出积极效应, 即对积极刺激的记忆比对消极刺激的记忆更好。从动机层面来讲, 社会情绪选择理论认为老年人比年轻人更倾向于进行情绪调节。在记忆任务中, 这种情绪调节的动机使得老年人具有表现出积极效应的倾向, 但这种倾向只有在满足一定条件的情况下才能表现出来。情绪调节对记忆的影响可以通过注意选择、加工资源分配、情绪抑制、认知再评价等多种方式进行。未来研究需要进一步细分年龄段考察情绪的各维度如何影响老年人记忆的各个阶段。

The Elderly’s Positivity Effect in Emotional Memory and Its Underlying Mechanisms

Piles of researches about emotion and memory have verified in elderly’s memory the existence of positivity effect,thus the elderly usually remember positive stimuli better than negative ones. Socioemotional Selectivity Theory,a theory focusing on behavioral motivation,proposes that the elderly’s more inclining to adopt emotion regulation strategies in memory tasks makes them possessing a tendency to process positive information better. While such a tendency comes true only if certain conditions are fulfilled. The emotion regulation may impose its influence on the elderly’s memory through several pathways at least,such as attention selection,distribution of cognitive resources,depressing negative emotion,cognitive reappraisal,etc.,and finally facilitates positivity effect. When it comes to future researches,among quite a lot of unsolved enigmas in the domain of the elderly’s emotion and memory,several fundamental puzzles should be paid enough attention on,including how each dimension of emotion and each kind of emotion regulation strategies affect the several memory stages of the elderly of varied ages.