老年人对情绪性事件的情景模拟:回忆过去与想象未来

研究采用自传体访谈技术,首次考察了老年人在对情绪性事件进行回忆和想象中生成的内部细节和外部细节数量,及其对回忆和想象内容的主观评估。结果发现:(1)无论是回忆还是想象任务,老年人都比年轻人提供了更少的内部细节和略多的外部细节;(2)与年轻人相似,老年人在想象未来积极事件时产生了更多的内部细节,表现出对积极信息的加工偏好;(3)老年人比年轻人更倾向于认为想象的事件与过去发生的事件相似度高,表明该群体在想象过程中更多地依赖了过去的记忆。该结果揭示了老年人对情绪性事件的回忆和想象特点,说明在回忆和想象过程中出现的与年龄有关的缺陷同样会体现在情绪性事件中,这很好地支持了建构性情景模拟假说。

Episodic Simulation of Past and Future Emotional Events in Older Adults: Evidence from an Autobiographical Interview Task

People frequently re-experience past events and imagine specific events that might occur in their futures. Related studies regarding episodic future thinking mainly focus on young adults, a few studies in older adults show that they generate fewer internal (episodic) details and more external (semantic) details than do younger adults when remembering past events or imagining possible future events. But less is know whether older adults could show similar pattern during their remembering or imagining emotional events. Using the Autobiographical Interview task, the present experiment was conducted to examine how older adults and young adults generated internal details and external details when remembering and imagining emotional events. A 2(task type:remember past events vs. imagine future events)×3(emotional valence:positive, negative vs. neutral)×2(age:older adults vs. young adults) mixed design was used, which age was between-subject factor and the others were within-subject factors. Participants were 15 undergraduates and 13 older adults. The results showed that, (1) older adults generated fewer internal details and more external details than did younger adults when remembering past emotional events or imagining possible future emotional events. (2) Similar to young adults, older adults generated more details when they simulated positive future events, indicating their processing bias to positive information. (3) The rating of similarity between past events and future events given by older adults was higher than by young adults, which demonstrated that older adults depend mostly on their memories during the process of imagination. The results suggest that the age-related deficit in remembering the past and imagining the future can exist in the simulation of emotional events, which could provide strong evidence for the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis.