The Influence of Discrete Negative and Positive Stimuli on Recognition Memory of Younger vs. Older Adults

ABSTRACT

Background: The effects of emotional stimuli on memory in older adults are often addressed in terms of socio-emotional selectivity theory and the valence dimension. Older adults usually remember positive stimuli better than negative stimuli. However, studies examining the effects of discrete emotions on the elderly are still limited. The present study examined the effects of negative and positive discrete emotions (fear, disgust, and happiness) on recognition memory of older and younger adults.

Method: In the encoding phase, participants studied happiness-, disgust-, fear-, and neutral- related photos while doing a line discrimination task that assessed their attention. After 45 minutes, they completed an old/new recognition memory test on a confidence rating scale and also rated self-relevance of photos.

Results: Younger participants showed a more liberal response bias for disgust- and fear-related stimuli, and were also more accurate in recognizing disgust-related photos compared to others. Older adults showed a more liberal bias only for disgust-related stimuli, however, their recognition accuracy did not differ across emotion categories.

Conclusion: These results suggested that the effect of disgust-related stimuli on recognition memory may decrease with age and emotion effects cannot solely be accounted for by the valence/arousal dimensions.

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Hanah A. Chapman for sharing her stimuli set with us. We thank Cevdet Durmuş and Özge Umur for their help with data collection, and Elvan Arıkan İyilikci for her comments on an earlier draft of this article. We thank Gaziemir Ata Evi Senior Citizen Center psychologist Zeynep Şarkıcı and all other employees for helping us reach older participants. Finally, we are grateful to our participants for their valuable contributions to this project.

Notes

1. All post-hoc comparisons were done using the Bonferroni correction.

2. For older adults, disgust experience distributions were not normal and the assumption of homogeneity of variance was violated. Results were reported with log10 transformation and equal variances was not assumed for the independent t-test.