Do young and older adults show emotional enhancement effects
in memory for incidentally encoded information?
Arousal
Condition
Older
High Arousal
Low Arousal
M age
73.92
72.92
Young
M age
n
23.25
24
22.42
24
n
25
24
High arousal and low arousal words were selected from the Affective
Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999) and were divided into two
sets. Each set contained 72 words (24 positive, 24 negative, and 24 neutral) and was
presented in a pseudo-randomized and intermixed order in the main emotional Stroop
task (as the incidental encoding task).
At encoding, participants completed an emotional Stroop task in
which they reported the ink color of each word as quickly and as accurately as
possible. After a 2-minute delay, participants completed a surprise free recall task.
Encoding
(emotional
Stroop)
Hateful
Humble
Filler Tasks
(2 Minutes)
Happy
Free Recall 7
Minutes
.07
Proportional Recall
According to the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory, changing
time horizons with aging, such as the perception of reduced time
left in their lifespan, leads to motivational shifts. As a result, older
adults shift to prioritize social emotional goals (i.e., to enhance
well-being) over knowledge-acquisition goals. Driven by this
motivational shift, older adults differentially attend to and
remember positive information better than negative and neutral
information (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005; Charles, Mather, &
Carstensen, 2003; Mather & Carstensen, 2005). This positivity
effect in old age has been reported with intentional memory
paradigms. However, it has been shown that the presence of
positivity effects may vary as a function of viewing instructions or
the arousal level of testing stimuli (Emery & Hess, 2008;
Kensinger, 2008). Furthermore, It is unclear whether age
differences in emotional memory would be extended to
incidentally encoded task-irrelevant stimuli. To fill the gap, the
current study aims to investigate age differences in memory for
incidentally encoded words with an emotional Stroop task in
which participants name the ink colors of emotional and neutral
words. Relatively few studies have conducted emotional Stroop
tasks with both young and older adults (Ashley & Swick, 2009;
LaMonica et al., 2010; Wurm et al., 2004). To our knowledge, no
published studies have examined age differences in memory for
incidentally encoded task-irrelevant emotional information, such
as words in an emotional Stroop task.
High arousal
Low arousal
.06
.05
.04
.03
Negativity effect in older adults:
According to Mather and Knight (2005), positivity effects require cognitive
control, and can be reversed by reducing older adults resources at encoding.
Older adults' greater recall of negative over positive words in our study
suggests that the emotional Stroop task (i.e., attend to color, inhibit irrelevant
word) may limit older adults’ cognitive control resources. This depletion of their
resources would impinge on their ability to fully implement their emotion
regulation goals, which requires employing control mechanisms to inhibit
automatically activated yet goal-inconsistent information (i.e., negative words).
Chronic
automatic
activation
of emotion
regulation
goals in
older adults
Utilization of available cognitive
control resources, necessary to
diminish negative information and
enhance positive information
Limited cognitive control resources
(e.g., Divided Attention/Distraction)
Age x valence
interactions
in memory
No age x valence
interactions
in memory
Mather & Knight (2005)
1. Both young and older adults show an emotional enhancement effect in
memory for incidentally encoded words.
2. Both young and older adults show a negativity bias. The lack of positivity
bias in older adults may due to the low level of cognitive resources as
induced by the highly-demanding emotional Stroop task.
.02
.01
.00
Negative Positive Neutral Negative Positive Neutral
1. Both young and older adults show better recall for emotional
relative to neutral words that were incidentally encoded.
2. Older adults show a positivity bias in memory for incidentally
encoded information.
Low level of recall, particularly in older adults:
Previous literature suggests that high resource demands of a modified Stroop
task leads older adults to process task-irrelevant words in a shallower
perceptual manner, which thus explains the lower subsequent explicit recall,
particularly in older adults (Gopie, Craik, & Hasher, 2011).
Young
Older
Three significant main effects:
Neg>Pos>Neu (p < .001); YA>OA (p < .05); HA>LA (p < .05)
Carstensen, L. L., & Mikels, J. A. (2005). At the intersection of emotion
and cognition: Aging and the positivity effect. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 14, 117-121.
Mather, M., & Knight, M. (2005). Goal-directed memory: The role of
cognitive control in older adults’ emotional memory. Psychology and
Aging, 20, 554-570.
This study is funded by the NSERC Discovery Grant awarded to Dr. Lixia Yang; the NSERC USRA Program and the Faculty of Arts URO program awarded to Dana Greenbaum. Please send correspondence to dgreenba@ryerson.ca