Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences
cite as: J Gerontol B Psych Sci Soc Sci, 2015, Vol. 70, No. 5, 737–742
doi:10.1093/geronb/gbt132
Advance Access publication January 3, 2014
Brief Report
Similarity to the Self Affects Memory for
Impressions of Others in Younger and
Older Adults
Eric D. Leshikar,1 Jung M. Park,2 and Angela H. Gutchess2
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago. 2Department of Psychology, Brandeis University,
Waltham, Massachusetts.
1
Correspondence should be addressed to Eric D. Leshikar, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago,
1007 W. Harrison Street (M/C 285), Chicago, IL 60607-7137. E-mail: leshikar@uic.edu.
Received July 29 2013; Accepted December 3 2013.
Decision Editor: Bob G. Knight, PhD
Abstract
Objectives. Similarity to the self has been shown to affect memory for impressions in younger
adults, suggesting a self-reference effect in person memory. Because older adults show comparable
self-reference effects, but prioritize memory for positive over negative information relative to
young adults, we examined age differences in self-similarity effects on memory for positive and
negative impressions.
Method. Younger and older adults formed positive and negative impressions of others differing in
the degree of similarity to the self (high, medium, low).
Results. For positive impressions, both groups showed enhanced memory for self-similar others
relative to dissimilar others, whereas for negative impressions, memory was poorer for those
similar to the self. When collapsed across similarity to the self, younger adults remembered
negative impressions better than older adults, but interestingly, older adults exhibited a trend for
better memory for the positive impressions.
Discussion. Results suggest that self-reference effects in impression memory are preserved with age
and that older adults exhibit positivity effects in person memory consistent with previous findings.
Key Words: Aging—Impression formation—Memory—Self-reference effect—Spontaneous trait inference
Processing information relative to the self improves memory in older
and younger adults (Glisky & Marquine, 2009; Gutchess, Kensinger,
Yoon, & Schacter, 2007; Leshikar & Duarte, 2012, 2013; Mueller,
Wonderlich, & Dugan, 1986; Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977) and
sometimes leads to age-equivalent memory performance (Experiment
1, Cassidy & Gutchess, 2012; Rosa & Gutchess, 2011). We recently
demonstrated that self-reference effects extend to memories about
other individuals in younger adults (Leshikar & Gutchess, 2013).
Specifically, participants in that study formed either positive or negative impressions of others exhibiting characteristics (e.g., kindness)
that varied in self-descriptiveness. For positive impressions, memory
was better for those showing characteristics similar to oneself. In
contrast, memory for negative impressions was poorest for those
showing characteristics similar to the self.
Previous work has shown age differences in memory for specific
behaviors performed by other individuals (Hess & Tate, 1991). No
investigation, however, has examined age differences in memory for
positive or negative impressions of others, apart from memory for
the specific behaviors. Testing memory for impressions separately
from memory for specific behaviors is important considering that
people can remember their impressions even when they cannot
remember the behaviors upon which their impressions were based
© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
737
738
Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 2015, Vol. 70, No. 5
(Todorov & Uleman, 2003). Because memory for specific details is
impaired with age (e.g., Spencer & Raz, 1995; Schacter, Kaszniak,
Kihlstrom, & Valdiserri, 1991), we examined whether impression
memory—remembering that this impression was associated with
that person—shows age-related decline, or whether impression
memory might be spared, consistent with work showing preserved
memory for specific details concerning materials rich in social detail
in older adults (Rahhal, May, & Hasher, 2002).
Valence is inherently important in impressions, which typically
reflect a general positive or negative assessment of someone (Srull &
Wyer, 1989). Valenced information is remembered differently with age,
with younger adults remembering proportionally more negative than
positive information whereas older adults tend to remember proportionally more positive than negative information (Charles, Mather, &
Carstensen, 2003, 2005). One investigation showed that older adults
had significantly better memory for happy faces than angry or neutral
faces, whereas younger adults’ memory did not differ across expressions (Ebner & Johnson, 2009). Thus, older adults may show relatively
preserved memory for positive impressions compared with younger
adults, while exhibiting poorer memory for negative impressions.
We examine memory for positive and negative impressions of
others in younger and older adults as a function of self-similarity
(high, medium, low). We predict that similarity to the self would
affect impression memory, with both groups showing better memory for others associated with positive impressions who are similar to the self, whereas self-similarity should lead to poor memory
for others associated with negative impressions, consistent with our
prior work in younger adults (Leshikar & Gutchess, 2013), and
literature showing similar self-reference effects on memory across
age (Dulas, Newsome, & Duarte, 2011; Glisky & Marquine, 2009;
Hamami, Serbun, & Gutchess, 2011; Leshikar & Duarte, 2013;
Mueller et al., 1986; Rosa & Gutchess, 2011). We further predict
that valence, collapsed across similarity to the self, will differentially
affect impression memory across age, with older adults showing
preserved memory for the positive impressions and poorer memory
for negative impressions relative to younger adults, consistent with
previously reported positivity effects (Charles et al., 2003; Mather &
Carstensen, 2005; Scheibe & Carstensen, 2010).
Methods
Twenty-nine younger (age: 19.9, SD: 2.1, range 18–26, 19 females)
and 29 older adults (age: 74.6, SD: 5.2, range 66–87, 18 females)
participated in this experiment. An additional three younger and
four older adults were excluded for failing to use each of the levels
of self-similarity ratings (high, medium, low). Participants gave written informed consent in compliance with the Brandeis Institutional
Review Board.
There were 216 face-sentence pairs, with faces drawn from a face
database (Minear & Park, 2004). Normed sentences (Uleman, 1988)
described a behavior (e.g., “This person returned the wallet with
all the money in it.”) that implied a trait (e.g., honesty). Sentences
were selected so that half would elicit positive and half negative
impressions.
There were three study-test blocks. At study, participants formed
impressions for 144 trials (see Figure 1). For each trial, participants
were instructed to form a positive or a negative impression of that
person based on the sentence and report that impression via a button
press (1 = positive; 2 = negative).
The recognition memory test consisted of 216 trials (144 studied
and 72 unstudied items). For each trial, participants made two judgments: First, participants were shown a face and decided whether
they had generated a positive or negative impression for that face at
study, or decided whether the face was unstudied. Correct impression
trials were those where participants accurately remembered their
impressions generated at study. Second, participants decided which
sentence had been paired with the face during study. Participants
selected from the correct sentence, a sentence of the same valence
(e.g., positive, negative) paired with a different face at study (e.g.,
re-paired lure), and the option to call the face new.
Figure 1. Trial schematic for the study (impression formation) and test phases of the experiment.
Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 2015, Vol. 70, No. 5
Immediately following the last study-test block, participants
completed a self-paced, post-test rating for 144 trait words. Each
word was a trait implied by a behavioral sentence seen at study.
Participants rated the self-descriptiveness of the trait on a threepoint scale (1 = describes me a lot, 2 = describes me a little, 3 = does
not describe me). This rating allowed us to back-sort all trials into
high-, medium-, and low-self-similarity.
Results
No group differences emerged in the generation of positive (younger,
56%, SD: 8%; older, 58% SD: 7%) or negative impressions (younger,
44%; older, 42%), ts = 0.68, ps = .50. Proportions of correct trials
(e.g., trials given a “positive” impression by the participant at study
subsequently endorsed as “positive” at test) and incorrect impression memory trials (e.g., trials given a “positive” impression at study
endorsed as “negative” at test) as well as the proportion of studied
items endorsed as new (misses) are shown in Table 1, along with
responses to the novel (unstudied) trials. Proportions of trials binned
into high-, medium-, and low-self-similarity are shown in Table 1.
A chi-square analysis showed that the distribution of bin sizes differed across categories, χ2(5) = 17.7, p < .01, which was driven by
fewer low-self positive and high-self negative trial types in both age
groups. Importantly, however, bin sizes did not differ across age for
any bin category, ts < 1.4, ps > .16.
Impression memory was calculated by taking the proportion
of correct impressions out of the correctly recognized old items
(See Figure 2; formula: correct impressions/[correct impressions +
incorrect impressions]). An Age (younger, older) by Valence (positive, negative) by Self (high, medium, low) repeated measures analysis of variance on impression memory indicated an Age effect,
F(1, 56) = 6.35, p = .02, ηp2 = .10, driven by better memory for
the younger (M = .73) than the older adults (M = .67), a Valence
effect, F(1, 56) = 45.08, p < .001, ηp2 = .44, with better memory
for the positive (M = .81) than negative items (M = .59), and a Self
effect, F(2, 112) = 3.80, p = .03, ηp2 = .06, driven by better memory
for the medium- (M = .73), than high- (M = .68) or low-self trials
739
(M = .69), ts > 2.78, p < .007. (Note that the better memory for the
medium- than high- or low-self-similarity trials occurred when collapsing across valence. To calculate high-self memory performance,
memory for the positive-high-self trials [which was high] was combined with the performance for the negative-high-self trials [which
was low], whereas the contribution of valence was less extreme for
the medium-self trials.) There was also a significant Valence by Self
interaction, F(2, 112) = 35.54, p < .001, ηp2 = .39. Simple effects
analysis showed a significant effect of Self for positive impressions,
F(2, 114) = 26.04, p < .001, ηp2 = .31, which resulted from better
memory for the high- (M = .88), than medium- (M = .84) or lowself-similarity trials (M = .70), ts > 2.79, p < .007. Simple effects
for the negative impression trials also resulted in a Self effect, F(2,
114) = 19.82, p < .001, ηp2 = .26, which was driven by better memory
for the low- (M = .68), than either medium- (M = .61), or high-selfsimilarity trials (M = .48), ts > 2.70, p < .009. There was also an
Age by Valence interaction, F(1, 56) = 12.79, p = .001, ηp2 = .19.
Simple effects showed a trend for better memory in the older adults
(M = .84) for positive impressions than the younger adults (M = .78),
F (1, 56) = 3.32, p = .07, ηp2 = .06. Younger adults, however, correctly remembered more negative impressions (M = .68) than older
adults (M = .50), F(1, 56) = 12.95, p = .001, ηp2 = .19. We further
followed up the age by valence interaction by looking at effects of
valence within each age group. Both groups showed a valence effect
with positive better remembered than negative trials (younger adults,
F(1, 28) = 5.97, p = .02, ηp2 = .18; older adults, F(1, 28) = 45.17, p <
.001, ηp2 = .62), although the presence of the interaction and inspection of the patterns indicate that the valence effect was stronger for
older than younger adults. Given our primary interest in impression memory, results from the sentence memory task are reported in
Supplementary Data, but are not further discussed.
Discussion
We investigated the influence of the self on impression memory in
both younger and older adults. We report two findings: First, both
age groups showed better memory for self-similar others when the
Table 1. Proportion of Studied Items Associated With Correct Impression Responses, Incorrect Impression Responses, and Item Misses, as
Well as the Proportions of New Items Endorsed as Positive (FA-Positive), Negative (FA-Negative), or New (CR), Is Shown for Younger and
Older Adults
Impression memory
Studied items as a function of:
Self-relevance
Initial impression
High
Positive
Negative
Medium
Positive
Negative
Low
Positive
Negative
Unstudied items
Trial proportions
Correct impression
Incorrect impression
New (miss)
Younger
Older
Younger
Older
Younger
Older
Younger
Older
.69 (.13)
.42 (.22)
.66 (.15)
.60 (.17)
.52 (.20)
.66 (.16)
FA-positive
Younger
.19 (.11)
.79 (.12)
.35 (.28)
.72 (.12)
.41 (.25)
.60 (.25)
.44 (.21)
.11 (.09)
.36 (.21)
.14 (.09)
.23 (.15)
.27 (.18)
.17 (.10)
FA-negative
Younger
.11 (.08)
.08 (.08)
.43 (.28)
.11 (.08)
.39 (.23)
.21 (.23)
.35 (.22)
.20 (.10)
.22 (.22)
.20 (.13)
.17 (.10)
.21 (.17)
.18 (.11)
New (CR)
Younger
.70 (.14)
.13 (.08)
.22 (.26)
.17 (.11)
.21 (.15)
.18 (.16)
.21 (.12)
.46 (.15)
.14 (.06)
.40 (.14)
.42 (.13)
.14 (.06)
.44 (.13)
.48 (.16)
.13 (.11)
.36 (.17)
.35 (.18)
.16 (.08)
.52 (.20)
Older
.31 (.03)
Older
.12 (.02)
Older
.57 (.04)
Note. Impression memory was calculated as the proportion of correct impression out of the proportion of correctly recognized old items (correction plus incorrect impression judgments). Proportions of trials binned into high, medium, and low-self-similarity based on participants subjective post-test rating is also shown
as a function of valence for both the younger and older adults. CR = Correct rejection; FA = False alarm.
740
Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 2015, Vol. 70, No. 5
Figure 2. Impression memory for others as a function of self-similarity (high, medium, low; as displayed left to right) and valence of the initial impressions
(positive—solid bars, negative—open bars) are depicted for younger and older adults.
initial impression was positive and worse memory when the initial
impression was negative. Second, valence, regardless of similarity to
the self, affected memory with older adults showing poorer memory
for negative impressions but a trend for enhanced memory for positive impressions compared with the younger adults.
For the self-similarity effects, both age groups showed improved
memory for positive impressions as self-similarity increased, with the
best memory for high-self-similar others. This finding is consistent
with our previous work in younger adults (Leshikar & Gutchess,
2013), and suggests that self-reference effects in impression memory
are evident in older adults, contributing to a growing literature showing stable benefits of self-referencing in older adults as in the young
(Dulas et al., 2011; Glisky & Marquine, 2009; Gutchess et al., 2007;
Hamami et al., 2011; Mueller et al., 1986; Rosa & Gutchess, 2011).
Specifically, recent work has shown that relevance to the self facilitates memory for contextual details in younger (Dulas et al., 2011;
Leshikar & Duarte, 2012; Serbun, Shih, & Gutchess, 2011) and
older adults (Hamami et al., 2011; Leshikar & Duarte, 2013; Rosa
& Gutchess, 2011). Here we extend this prior work by showing
facilitated memory for specific details (impressions) in a social context. Interestingly, these effects occurred in a study task that was not
explicitly self-referential, consistent with prior work showing that
self-reference effects occur spontaneously and effortlessly (Kesebir &
Oishi, 2010; Yang, Truong, Fuss, & Bislimovic, 2012). For negative
impressions, both age groups showed decreased memory with higher
degrees of self-similarity. It may be that when faced with information that is both negative and self-relevant, young and older adults
engage in more shallow encoding as a means to protect the selfschema, consistent with self-enhancement effects (D’Argembeau &
Van der Linden, 2008; Leary, 2007), which may have led to the poor
memory for the high-self-similar negative impression trials. Further
work will be necessary to understand this inverse self-reference effect
for the negative impressions.
Although these data suggest that impression memory is affected
by similarity to the self, there is also an alternative possibility. It
is possible that the strength of the impression could have been less
strong for the low-similarity positive and high-similarity negative trials. Thus, when seeing a face, participants might have recalled the
sentence but have a harder time remembering their original impression because they generated an ambivalent impression. Further work
will be necessary to assess how the strength of the impression influences memory.
When collapsed across similarity to the self, valence led to
memory differences across age. For positive impressions, older
adults, relative to the young, showed a trend for enhanced memory,
consistent with previous reports of positivity effects (Mather &
Carstensen, 2005). Socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that
older adults place increasing importance on positive experiences,
such as maintaining positive affect and personally meaningful social
relationships (Carstensen, 1992), with some work even showing that
older adults perceive stimuli as more positive under some circumstances (Kellough & Knight, 2012). Thus, older adults may be more
motivated than the young to remember positive information about
others. Indeed, older adults may be more motivated to remember
positive impressions because it is only with such individuals that a
rich social relationship might develop, reflecting the importance that
personal meaningfulness plays in memory in older adults. A recent
memory investigation showed disproportionally enhanced memory
for older adults when they processed social materials for personal
meaningfulness (e.g., “would I want this person to play a role in
my life?”) than in a less meaningful context (Cassidy & Gutchess,
2012). For the negative impressions, however, older adults showed
poorer memory than the young. Interestingly, older adults showed
a stronger memory advantage for positive over negative impressions, which might suggest a negativity-avoidance pattern in the
older adults, consistent with prior work (Xing & Isaacowitz, 2006).
Because work has shown that older adults are less sensitive to negative cues, such as whether someone is untrustworthy (Castle et al.,
2012) it may be that when encountering someone they do not like,
older adults may process attributes about them shallowly, which,
in a broader context, could potentially contribute to older adults’
greater susceptibility to fraud.
One limitation to the design is that the uneven numbers of high-,
medium-, and low-self-similarity trials, an unavoidable consequence
of subjective ratings, could have influenced memory performance.
For instance, small bin sizes may have been expected to make some
trial types more distinctive and thus more memorable, although
overall that does not appear to be the case. Importantly, because
bin sizes did not differ across age, we believe this possibility did not
affect our interpretation of memory effects across groups.
Overall, these data suggest that similarity to the self affects memory for impressions of others similarly in younger and older adults,
consistent with reports of stable self-reference effects over the life
span. Although older adults showed a trend for better memory for
the positive impressions relative to the young, they further showed
significantly poorer memory for negative impression trials, which
we argue reflects changing information processing goals in older
adults who tend to attend more to personally meaningful and positive materials.
Supplementary Material
Supplementary material can be found at: http://psychsocgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/
Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 2015, Vol. 70, No. 5
Funding
This work was supported by National Institute on Aging (R21
AG032382 to A. H. Gutchess) and National Institutes of Health
(T32AG000204-21 to E. D. Leshikar).
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Liat Zabludovsky, Rozi Levi, Karan Malik, Tali Friedland,
and Pete Millar for assistance during data collection.
References
Carstensen, L. L. (1992). Social and emotional patterns in adulthood: support
for socioemotional selectivity theory. Psychology and Aging, 7, 331.
Cassidy, B. S., & Gutchess, A. H. (2012). Social relevance enhances memory
for impressions in older adults. Memory, 20, 332–345. doi:10.1080/174
70919.2013.832373
Castle, E., Eisenberger, N. I., Seeman, T. E., Moons, W. G., Boggero, I. A., Grinblatt, M. S., & Taylor, S. E. (2012). Neural and behavioral bases of age
differences in perceptions of trust. Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, 109, 20848–20852. doi:10.1073/pnas.1218518109
Charles, S. T., Mather, M., & Carstensen, L. L. (2003). Aging and emotional
memory: The forgettable nature of negative images for older adults. Journal
of Experimental Psychology-General, 132, 310–324. doi:10.1037/00963445.132.2.310
D’Argembeau, A., & Van der Linden, M. (2008). Remembering pride
and shame: self-enhancement and the phenomenology of autobiographical memory. Memory, 16, 538–547. doi: 792623179 [pii]
10.1080/09658210802010463
Dulas, M. R., Newsome, R. N., & Duarte, A. (2011). The effects of aging
on ERP correlates of source memory retrieval for self-referential information. Brain Research, 1377, 84–100. doi: S0006-8993(11)00008-4
[pii]10.1016/j.brainres.2010.12.087
Ebner, N. C., & Johnson, M. K. (2009). Young and older emotional faces:
Are there age-group differences in expression identification and memory?
Emotion (Washington, DC), 9, 329. doi:10.1037/a0015179
Glisky, E. L., & Marquine, M. J. (2009). Semantic and self-referential processing of positive and negative trait adjectives in older adults. Memory, 17,
144–157. doi:792992980 [pii] 10.1080/09658210802077405
Gutchess, A. H., Kensinger, E. A., Yoon, C., & Schacter, D. L. (2007). Ageing and the self-reference effect in memory. Memory, 15, 822–837. doi:
783624081 [pii] 10.1080/09658210701701394
Hamami, A., Serbun, S. J., & Gutchess, A. H. (2011). Self-referencing enhances
memory specificity with age. Psychology and Aging, 26, 636.
Hess, T. M., & Tate, C. S. (1991). Adult age differences in explanations and
memory for behavioral information. Psychology and Aging, 6(1), 86–92.
Kellough, J. L., & Knight, B. G. (2012). Positivity effects in older adults’ perception
of facial emotion: The role of future time perspective. The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 67, 150–158.
Kesebir, S., & Oishi, S. (2010). A spontaneous self-reference effect in memory
why some birthdays are harder to remember than others. Psychological
Science, 21, 1525–1531.
741
Leary, M. R. (2007). Motivational and emotional aspects of the self. Annual
Review of Psychology, 58, 317–344.
Leshikar, E. D., & Duarte, A. (2012). Medial prefrontal cortex supports source
memory accuracy for self-referenced items. Social Neuroscience, 7, 126–
145. doi:10.1080/17470919.2011.585242
Leshikar, E. D., & Duarte, A. (2013). Medial prefrontal cortex supports source
memory for self-referenced materials in young and older adults. Cognitive
Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 1–17. doi:10.3758/s13415-0130198-y
Leshikar, E. D., & Gutchess, A. H. (2013). Similarity to the self affects impression memory for others. Under review
Mather, M., & Carstensen, L. L. (2005). Aging and motivated cognition:
the positivity effect in attention and memory. Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 9, 496–502. doi:S1364-6613(05)00237-8 [pii] 10.1016/j.
tics.2005.08.005
Minear, M., & Park, D. C. (2004). A lifespan database of adult facial stimuli.
Behavior Research Methods, 36, 630–633.
Mueller, J. H., Wonderlich, S., & Dugan, K. (1986). Self-referent processing of
age-specific material. Psychology and Aging, 1, 293–299.
Rahhal, T. A., May, C. P., & Hasher, L. (2002). Truth and character: sources
that older adults can remember. Psychological Science, 13, 101–105.
Rogers, T. B., Kuiper, N. A., & Kirker, W. S. (1977). Self-reference and the
encoding of personal information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 677–688.
Rosa, N. M., & Gutchess, A. H. (2011). Source memory for action in young
and older adults: Self vs. close or unknown others. Psychology and Aging,
26, 625. doi:10.1037/a0022827
Schacter, D. L., Kaszniak, A. W., Kihlstrom, J. F., & Valdiserri, M. (1991). The
relation between source memory and aging. Psychology and Aging, 6,
559–568.
Scheibe, S., & Carstensen, L. L. (2010). Emotional aging: recent findings and
future trends. The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 65, 135–144.
Serbun, S. J., Shih, J. Y., & Gutchess, A. H. (2011). Memory for details with
self-referencing. Memory, 19, 1004–1014. doi:10.1080/09658211.2011.
626429
Srull, T. K., & Wyer, R. S. (1989). Person memory and judgment. Psychological
Review, 96(1), 58.
Spencer, W. D., & Raz, N. (1995). Differential effects of aging on memory
for content and context: A meta-analysis. Psychology and Aging, 10,
527–539.
Todorov, A., & Uleman, J. S. (2003). The efficiency of binding spontaneous
trait inferences to actors’ faces. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 549–562.
Uleman, J. (1988). Trait and gist inference norms for over 300 potential traitimplying sentences. Unpublished raw data.
Xing, C., & Isaacowitz, D. M. (2006). Aiming at happiness: How motivation
affects attention to and memory for emotional images. Motivation and
Emotion, 30, 243–250. doi:10.1007/s11031-006-9032-y
Yang, L., Truong, L., Fuss, S., & Bislimovic, S. (2012). The effects of ageing
and divided attention on the self-reference effect in emotional memory:
Spontaneous or effortful mnemonic benefits? Memory, 20, 596–607. doi:
10.1080/09658211.2012.690040