Memory for faces with emotional expressions in Alzheimer’s disease and healthy older participants: positivity effect is not only due to familiarity

ABSTRACT

Young individuals better memorize initially seen faces with emotional rather than neutral expressions. Healthy older participants and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients show better memory for faces with positive expressions. The socioemotional selectivity theory postulates that this positivity effect in memory reflects a general age-related preference for positive stimuli, subserving emotion regulation. Another explanation might be that older participants use compensatory strategies, often considering happy faces as previously seen. The question about the existence of this effect in tasks not permitting such compensatory strategies is still open. Thus, we compared the performance of healthy participants and AD patients for positive, neutral, and negative faces in such tasks. Healthy older participants and AD patients showed a positivity effect in memory, but there was no difference between emotional and neutral faces in young participants. Our results suggest that the positivity effect in memory is not entirely due to the sense of familiarity for smiling faces.

KEYWORDS:

• Alzheimer’s disease
• healthy aging
• emotional expressions
• positivity effect in memory
• familiarity

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the participants for their time and effort and their families and careers for supporting their research. They would also like to thank Eduard Pascariu for language checking of this document.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Lyon University’s LABEX CORTEX [ANR-10-LABX-0042] as part of the “Investissements d’Avenir” program [ANR-11-IDEX-0007] run by the French National Research Agency (ANR).