Perceived event resolution—rather than time—allows older adults to reduce the negativity of their memories

ABSTRACT

In addition to showing greater memory positivity soon after negative events, older adults can be more likely than younger adults to show decreases in memory negativity as events grow more distant. We recently showed that this latter effect was not present when adults were asked to rate memories of the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (March-May 2020): after a short (June/July 2020) and long delay (October/November 2020), older age was associated with greater reflections on positive aspects, but with no difference in negative aspects. We suggested that older adults did not show decreased negativity because the pandemic was still prevalent in their daily lives. The present study examines whether perceived event resolution—rather than time on its own—may be necessary to show age-related decreases in negativity by surveying participants during a time when many may have felt like the pandemic had resolved (Summer 2021). Once again, age was associated with increased ratings of the positive aspects, but at this timepoint, age was also associated with decreased ratings of the negative aspects. These results suggest that older adults may more successfully decrease the negativity of their memories compared to younger adults only when they feel that events have resolved.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• aging
• emotion
• affect
• valence
• COVID-19
• pandemic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Although vaccines were widely available at this time, there was some regional variability in this availability that may influence a participant’s perceived event resolution. The current analysis focused on individuals who were fully vaccinated to reduce potential individual differences in memory shifts due to this variability.

2 The considerably greater number of female relative to male participants in our sample (85%) may influence some results. Although the small number of male participants also makes it impossible to include sex as a factor, we ran exploratory analyses to examine the effects. See “Interactions of age with biological sex” in supplementary materials for exploratory analysis of age-by-sex interactions.

3 These ten participants were excluded as it is possible that they would not perceive the pandemic as “resolved” while waiting for their vaccination. However there was no age difference between those who were and were not fully vaccinated and all memory patterns remained the same when analyses were conducted with these ten participants included.

4 The survey also included sleep and sleepiness questionnaires that are beyond the scope of the current analysis. See https://osf.io/gpxwa/ for the full survey.

5 Analyses were conducted on composite measures to keep the analysis consistent with the prior manuscript and to reduce number of comparisons. However, follow-up analyses were conducted with “question” included as a within-subject factor (see Supplementary Materials). This addition did not alter any of the reported patterns.

6 Analyses were conducted as a follow-up to those reported in Fields et al., 2022. These analyses compared the final timepoint reported in the prior manuscript to an additional time point in November 2021. See Supplementary Materials for all comparisons.

7 Full analyses for Time 4 were not included in the main manuscript because a) this analysis was exploratory and beyond the scope of our pre-registration and b) analyses suggest that emotional response at Time 3 may have influenced participation in the Time 4 survey, biasing the sample. See supplementary materials for full analyses.

8 See “Interactions of age with biological sex” in supplementary materials for exploratory analysis of age-by-sex interactions

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health: [Grant Number NIH NRSA T32 NS007292,NIH T32 HL007901].