Phenomenological characteristics of emotional memories in younger and older adults

Abstract

Older adults sometimes show a “positivity effect” in memory, remembering proportionally more positive information than younger adults. Using a modified Memory Characteristics Questionnaire, this study examined whether emotional valence impacts the phenomenological qualities of young and older adults’ memories. Ageing did not impact the effect of valence on the qualities of high-arousal memories. However, ageing sometimes impacted subjective memory for details of low-arousal memories: In Experiment 2, older adults reported remembering more thoughts, feelings, and temporal order details about positive low-arousal stimuli, while young adults’ ratings for those dimensions were higher for negative low-arousal stimuli. These findings suggest that valence most readily affects the qualities of young and older adults’ emotional memories when those memories are low in arousal.

Keywords:

• Memory
• Emotion
• Ageing

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by NIH grant MH080833 (to E.A.K.) and by a National Defense Science and Engineering graduate fellowship (to K.R.M.). We thank Elizabeth Choi and Keely Muscatell for assistance with participant recruitment, testing, and data management. We also thank Scott Slotnick and Maya Tamir for helpful discussion and Jonathan Romiti for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Portions of this manuscript were included in a master's thesis submitted by K.R.M.

Notes

¹We had intended “other associations” to tap into non-affective sensations that participants may have had while viewing the images; we gave participants examples such as remembering that they'd had an itch or that they'd felt a draught in the room while viewing the image. However, we cannot rule out the possibility that some participants included affective sensations in this category.

²The general pattern of results remained unchanged when uncorrected scores (raw ratings, without neutral subtracted out) were analysed, although power to detect effects was slightly higher when using the corrected scores, possibly because of individual differences in how the scales were used.