Mood, motivation, and misinformation: Aging and affective state influences on memory

ABSTRACT

Normative age differences in memory have typically been attributed to declines in basic cognitive and cortical mechanisms. The present study examined the degree to which dominant everyday affect might also be associated with age-related memory errors using the misinformation paradigm. Younger and older adults viewed a positive and a negative event, and then were exposed to misinformation about each event. Older adults exhibited a higher likelihood than young adults of falsely identifying misinformation as having occurred in the events. Consistent with expectations, strength of the misinformation effect was positively associated with dominant mood, and controlling for mood eliminated any age effects. Also, motivation to engage in complex cognitive activity was negatively associated with susceptibility to misinformation, and susceptibility was stronger for negative than for positive events. We argue that motivational processes underlie all of the observed effects, and that such processes are useful in understanding age differences in memory performance.

Keywords:

• Aging
• Memory
• Misinformation
• Affect
• Emotion

Acknowledgments

Support for this study was provided by NIA grant R01 AG020153. The authors would like to thank Keith Dowd for his assistance in participant recruitment and data entry; Angela Meluso, Taryn Patterson, Seb Prohn, and James Upright for their assistance in the creation of the stimulus events; and Carla Strickland-Hughes, Stephanie Conner, Margaret Laney, Amanda Lingle, Jessica White, and Kari Blevins for their help in data collection.

Notes

¹Concerns could be raised that mood alterations associated with our experimental induction might have complicated the use of this mood measure in our subsequent analyses as a measure of dominant mood reflective of age differences in such mood. Note, however, that in spite of participants reporting their mood to be affected by the induction, older adults as a group exhibited more positive moods than younger adults in all conditions across all measurement points. In addition, the mean change in mood for the two induction conditions was only 0.45 points on a scale of 1 to 8. Although reliable, the change was relatively small. These two factors together suggest that the confounding influence of the mood induction should be minimal.

²Although PNS and NFC do contain some construct overlap, they also focus on somewhat different processes. It may also be the case that these more unique processes may moderate the impact of each other. For example, a tendency toward cognitive structuring might be amplified in individuals who are high in NFC. (We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.) Including NFC and PNS as separate variables in our analyses, however, did not reveal such moderating effects, and each individually was associated with the misinformation effect (a negative association for NFC, and a positive association for PNS). However, the composite variable exhibited a stronger association, suggesting that the shared construct space was accounting for the observed effects.