Effects of emotion and age on performance during a think/no-think memory task.

Abstract

Recent studies have demonstrated that young adults can voluntarily suppress information from memory when directed to. After learning novel word pairings to criterion, participants are shown individual words and instructed either to “think” about the associated word, or to put it out of mind entirely (“no-think”). When given a surprise cued recall test, participants typically show impaired recall for “no-think” words relative to “think” or “control” (un-manipulated) words. The present study investigated whether this controlled suppression effect persists in an aged population, and examined how the emotionality of the to-be-suppressed word affects suppression ability. Data from four experiments using the think/no-think task demonstrate that older and younger adults can suppress information when directed to (Experiment 1), and the age groups do not differ significantly in this ability. Experiments 2 through 4 demonstrate that both age groups can suppress words that are emotional (positive or negative valence) or neutral. The suppression effect also persists even if participants are tested using independent probe words that are semantically related to the target words but were not the studied cue words (Experiments 3 and 4). These data suggest that the cognitive functioning necessary to suppress information from memory is present in older adulthood, and that both emotional and neutral information can be successfully suppressed from memory.

Towards a Cognitive and Neurobiological Model of Motivated Forgetting

“…Other authors have found that negative memories show smaller negative control effects than do neutral ones (Hertel & Gerstle, 2003 ;Marx, Marshall, & Castro, 2008 ;Nørby, Lange, & Larsen, 2010 ) . Other authors have reported similar impairment on neutral, negative, and positive items (Hulbert, Anderson, & Kuhl, in preparation ;Murray, Muscatell, & Kensinger, 2011 ).…”

Emotional and non-emotional memories are suppressible under direct suppression instructions

“…All previous studies demonstrating negative control effects for emotional memories, used no particular suppression instructions (e.g., Lambert et al, 2010;Marx et al, 2008;Murray et al, 2011), and so it cannot be known what processes caused these effects. Moreover, all studies of direct suppression have used neutral materials, leaving it unclear whether negative memories can be controlled in this fashion.…”

“…Others have found smaller effects for negative materials (e.g., Marx, Marshall, & Castro, 2008;Nørby, Lange, & Larsen, 2010). Others have found no measurable effects for valence (Murray, Muscatell, & Kensinger, 2011). It thus remains unclear why the relative magnitude of negative control effects for neutral and negative memories has varied so much.…”

Listwise directed forgetting is present in young-old adults, but is absent in old-old adults.

“…In particular, the findings are consistent with the previous result of intact control processes in young-old (though not old-old) adults' retrieval-induced forgetting and think/ no-think impairment (Asian & Bäum!, in press;Murray et al, 2011), and findings outside the memory domain reporting evidence for control processes that remain intact for the bigger part of the life span (e.g., Kieley & Hartley, 1997;Schooler et al, 1997). In a recent series of meta-analyses, Verhaeghen (2011) searched for a specific age-related deficit in (undifferentiated) older adults' executive functioning, employing tasks tapping local task-shifting costs, inhibition of retum, negative priming, and Stroop.…”