Emotional Expressivity in Older and Younger Adults' Descriptions of Personal Memories

Abstract

Background/Study Context: According to the socioemotional selectivity theory (SST; Mather & Carstensen, 2003, Psychological Sciences, 14, 409–415), aging is associated with greater motivation to regulate emotions. The authors propose that the language people use to describe personal memories provides an index of age differences in emotional self-regulation.

Methods: In the present article, the authors reanalyzed three previously published studies in which older (aged 60–88) and younger (aged 17–33) participants described emotional and neutral memories from their recent and distant pasts. The authors analyzed the language of the memories using Pennebaker, Booth, and Francis's (2007) Linguistic Inquiry Word Count program (Austin, TX: LIWC Inc.), which calculates the percentage of positive and negative emotion words.

Results: In Studies 1 and 2, older adults used more positive emotion words than did younger adults to describe their autobiographical memories from the recent past, particularly when these were of a neutral valence. In Study 3, older adults used more positive emotion words when describing more recent memories (from the past 5 years) but not when describing distant childhood or adolescent memories.

Conclusion: The authors suggest that these age differences in emotional expressivity support SST, and represent an as-yet unreported age difference that may stem from differences in motivation to regulate emotion.

Notes

Note. Overall analyses: N = 68.

¹The following is a breakdown of older and younger participants’ recall of positive, negative, and neutral events in the study: One older adult did not produce a single negative event in week 1. One older adult did not produce a single neutral event in week 1. One older adult was unable to recall either a single positive or negative event in week 2. Another older adult did not recall any negative or neutral events in week 2. Five older adults did not recall any negative events in week 2. Eighteen older adults did not recall any neutral events in week 2. One younger adult could not recall any negative events in the second week. Three younger adults could not produce a single neutral event in week 2.

²Findings from the valence rating scale were reported by Fernandes et al. (2008). However, Fernandes et al. (2008), examined a different aspect of the data (i.e., the proportion of events participants recalled) and therefore their sample size was different (N = 97) from that reported in the current paper (N = 68).

³Research of memory across the life span has typically found evidence of a reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory such that individuals remember more experiences from their late teens and 20s compared to memories from other life span periods (Holmes & Conway, 1999; Jansari & Parkin, 1996; Rubin & Berntsen, 2003; Webster & Gould, 2007). In the current research, we are not suggesting that memories from late adulthood are more vivid than childhood or adolescent events. We merely suggest that more distant memories are less vivid than very recent memories (from the past year).

⁴It is possible that in Study 3, age differences in language usage may represent in part the different kinds of memories (positive, negative, or neutral) that older and younger adults recalled for each lifetime period. It is not possible to disentangle recall and description in the current study.