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Abstract
As adults age, they tend to have problems remembering the details of events and the contexts in which events occurred. This review presents evidence that emotion can enhance older adults’ abilities to remember episodic detail. Older adults are more likely to remember affective details of an event (e.g., whether something was good or bad, or how an event made them feel) than they are to remember non-affective details, and they remember more details of emotional events than of non-emotional ones. Moreover, in some instances, emotion appears to narrow the age gap in memory performance. It may be that memory for affective context, or for emotional events, relies on cognitive and neural processes that are relatively preserved in older adults.
Acknowledgements
Preparation of this article was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant BCS 0542694) and by the American Federation for Ageing Research.
Notes
1In this paper I use the term “emotion” to refer to short-lived cognitive and somatic reactions to specific environmental or cognitive events (e.g., Scherer, Citation2000) and the term “affect” to refer more broadly to either the short-lived emotional reaction elicited by an event or to a more sustained mood state felt during an event.