Effects of Arousal and Context on Recognition Memory for Emotional Pictures in Younger and Older Adults

Abstract

Background/Study Context: Previous studies found that older adults tend to remember more positive than negative information (i.e., positivity bias), leading to an age-related positivity effect. However, the extent to which factors of arousal and contextual information influence the positivity bias in older adults remains to be determined.

Methods: In this study, 27 Chinese younger adults (20.00 ± 1.75 years) and 33 Chinese older adults (70.76 ± 5.49) learned pictures with negative, positive, and neutral valences. Half of the pictures had a human context, and the other half did not. In addition, emotional dimensions of negative and positive pictures were divided into high-arousal and low-arousal. The experimental task was to provide old/new recognition and confidence rating judgments.

Results: Both groups of subjects showed the positivity bias for low-arousal pictures, but the positivity bias was restricted to low-arousal pictures without the human context in older adults. In addition, the positivity bias was mainly driven by the recollection process in younger adults, and it was mainly driven by both the recollection and familiarity processes in older adults. The recognition of the nonhuman positive pictures was correlated with cognitive control abilities, but the recognition of pictures with human contexts was correlated with general memory abilities in older adults.

Conclusion: This study highlights the importance of arousal and contextual information in modulating emotional memory in younger and older adults. It suggests that there are different mechanisms for memorizing pictures with and without human contexts in older adults.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Dr. Jason Ozubko from University of Toronto for his help on data analysis. We thank Dr. Lynn Hasher from University of Toronto and Dr. Lixia Yang from Ryerson University for their instructive suggestions and discussion on an earlier draft of the article.

FUNDING

This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation of China (31171078, 31571114, J. Yang) and the Global Research Initiative Program, National Institutes of Health, USA (R01TW007897, J. Yang). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, preparation of the manuscript, or decision to publish.

Notes

¹ IAPS pictures used in the study are numbers 2730, 3500, 6210, 6230, 6250, 6260, 6300, 6312, 6370, 9250, 9410, 9810, 9921, 9000, 9280, 9340, 9560, 9561, 2750, 2751, 2900, 3300, 9041, 9220, 9331, 9520, 9530, 1080, 2702, 2692, 2682, 2681, 2600, 2590, 2575, 2372, 2312, 2110, 2100, 2020, 5450, 5480, 5621, 8180, 8300, 4598, 5470, 4002, 4003, 4300, 4659, 4664, 4680, 4683, 4800, 1610, 5030, 5779, 5870, 5891, 7286, 8600, 2000, 2092, 2360, 4700, 5831, 8032, and 8050.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation of China (31171078, 31571114, J. Yang) and the Global Research Initiative Program, National Institutes of Health, USA (R01TW007897, J. Yang). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, preparation of the manuscript, or decision to publish.