Mara Mather

Aging and emotional memory: the forgettable nature of negative images for older adults.

Two studies examined age differences in recall and recognition memory for positive, negative, and neutral stimuli. In Study 1, younger, middle-aged, and older adults were shown images on a computer screen and, after a distraction task, were asked first to recall as many as they could and then to identify previously shown images from a set of old and new ones. The relative number of negative images compared with positive and neutral images recalled decreased with each successively older age group. Recognition memory showed a similar decrease with age in the relative memory advantage for negative pictures. In Study 2, the largest age differences in recall and recognition accuracy were also for the negative images. Findings are consistent with socioemotional selectivity theory, which posits greater investment in emotion regulation with age.

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.

Amygdala Responses to Emotionally Valenced Stimuli in Older and Younger Adults

As they age, adults experience less negative emotion, come to pay less attention to negative than to positive emotional stimuli, and become less likely to remember negative than positive emotional materials. This profile of findings suggests that, with age, the amygdala may show decreased reactivity to negative information while maintaining or increasing its reactivity to positive information. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess whether amygdala activation in response to positive and negative emotional pictures changes with age. Both older and younger adults showed greater activation in the amygdala for emotional than for neutral pictures; however, for older adults, seeing positive pictures led to greater amygdala activation than seeing negative pictures, whereas this was not the case for younger adults.

The Role of Motivation in the Age-Related Positivity Effect in Autobiographical Memory

This study reveals that older adults have a positivity effect in long-term autobiographical memory and that a positivity bias can be induced in younger adults by a heightened motivation to regulate current emotional well-being. Three hundred nuns, ages 47 to 102 years, recalled personal information originally reported 14 years earlier. They did so under experimental conditions that repeatedly primed them to focus on their current emotional states or on their memory accuracy, or that provided no instructional focus (control condition). Both older control participants and participants who were focused on emotional states showed a tendency to remember the past more positively than they originally reported in 1987. In contrast, both younger control participants and participants who were focused on accuracy tended to remember the past more negatively than originally reported.

Arousal-biased competition in perception and memory

Our everyday surroundings besiege us with information. The battle is for a share of our limited attention and memory, with the brain selecting the winners and discarding the losers. Previous research shows that both bottom–up and top–down factors bias competition in favor of high priority stimuli. We propose that arousal during an event increases this bias both in perception and in long-term memory of the event. Arousal-biased competition theory provides specific predictions about when arousal will enhance memory for events and when it will impair it, which accounts for some puzzling contradictions in the emotional memory literature.

Evaluating characteristics of false memories: Remember/know judgments and memory characteristics questionnaire compared

Subjects hearing a list of associates to a nonpresented lure word later often claim to have heard the lure (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). To examine the characteristics of such false memories, subjects completed a memory characteristics questionnaire (MCQ; Johnson, Foley, Suengas, & Raye, 1988) or made remember/know (RK; Gardiner & Java, 1993) judgments for previously heard theme associates and nonpresented lures. MCQ ratings indicated that false memories for lures had less auditory detail and less remembered feelings and reactions than memories for presented words. In addition, rates of false recognition for lures were significantly lower than rates of correct recognition when items from various themes were intermixed instead of blocked at acquisition and subjects made MCQ ratings instead of RK judgments. This demonstrates that false memories can be affected both by how they are acquired and by how extensively they are examined at retrieval.

Emotional Arousal and Memory Binding: An Object-Based Framework

Binding various features of an event together and maintaining these connections in memory is an essential component of episodic memories. Previous theories make contradictory predictions about the effects of emotional arousal on memory binding. In this article, I review evidence for both arousal-impaired and arousal-enhanced memory binding and explain these contradictory findings using an object-based framework. According to this framework, emotionally arousing objects attract attention that enhances binding of their constituent features. In contrast, the emotional arousal associated with one object either impairs or has no effect on the associations between that object and other distinct objects or background contextual information. After initial encoding, the attention-grabbing nature of emotionally arousing objects can lead to interference in working memory, making it more difficult to maintain other bound representations. These contrasting effects of arousal on memory binding should help predict which aspects of emotional memories are likely to be accurate and which aspects are likely to be misremembered.

Aging and reflective processes of working memory: binding and test load deficits.

It was hypothesized that age-related deficits in episodic memory for feature combinations (e.g., B. L. Chalfonte & M. K. Johnson, 1996) signal, in part, decrements in the efficacy of reflective component processes (e.g., M. K. Johnson, 1992) that support the short-term maintenance and manipulation of information during encoding (e.g., F. 1. M. Craik. R. G. Morris. & M. L. Gick, 1990; T. A. Salthouse, 1990). Consistent with this, age-related binding deficits in a working memory task were found in 2 experiments. Evidence for an age-related test load deficit was also found: Older adults had greater difficulty than young adults when tested on 2 features rather than 1, even when binding was not required. Thus, disruption of source memory in older adults may involve deficits in both encoding processes (binding deficits) and monitoring processes (difficulty accessing multiple features, evaluating them, or both).

Acute Stress Increases Sex Differences in Risk Seeking in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task

Background Decisions involving risk often must be made under stressful circumstances. Research on behavioral and brain differences in stress responses suggest that stress might have different effects on risk taking in males and females. Methodology/Principal Findings In this study, participants played a computer game designed to measure risk taking (the Balloon Analogue Risk Task) fifteen minutes after completing a stress challenge or control task. Stress increased risk taking among men but decreased it among women. Conclusions/Significance Acute stress amplifies sex differences in risk seeking; making women more risk avoidant and men more risk seeking. Evolutionary principles may explain these stress-induced sex differences in risk taking behavior.

The emotion paradox in the aging brain

This paper reviews age differences in emotion processing and how they may relate to age‐related changes in the brain. Compared with younger adults, older adults react less to negative situations, ignore irrelevant negative stimuli better, and remember relatively more positive than negative information. Older adults’ ability to insulate their thoughts and emotional reactions from negative situations is likely due to a number of factors, such as being less influenced by interoceptive cues, selecting different emotion regulation strategies, having less age‐related decline in prefrontal regions associated with emotional control than in other prefrontal regions, and engaging in emotion regulation strategies as a default mode in their everyday lives. Healthy older adults’ avoidance of processing negative stimuli may contribute to their well‐maintained emotional well‐being. However, when cardiovascular disease leads to additional prefrontal white matter damage, older adults have fewer cognitive control mechanisms available to regulate their emotions, making them more vulnerable to depression. In general, although age‐related changes in the brain help shape emotional experience, shifts in preferred strategies and goal priorities are also important influences.