Emotion-enhanced binding of numerical information in younger and older adults

Abstract

There are documented deficits in older adults’ abilities to bind numerical information to other types of information, perhaps due to the arbitrariness and specificity of numbers. Although some studies have found that memory for associative details is more accurate for emotionally salient information than for emotionally neutral information, other research has failed to find this benefit. We investigated whether older adults’ associative memory deficit for numerical information may be reduced when information is encountered in an emotionally salient context. We presented younger and older adults with numerical information in a sentence that was emotionally positive, negative, or neutral and later asked them to recall the numbers when given their corresponding context. Although younger adults recalled more information than older adults, both groups of participants recalled more numbers in emotionally valenced as compared with emotionally neutral contexts, with the most accurate memory for numbers in the highly arousing negative context. Both groups of participants also rated the negative information as more important and easier to remember. These results provide evidence that emotion-enhanced binding is consistent between younger and older adults in some contexts and that memory for specific and arbitrary numerical information may be more accurate in an emotionally salient as compared with emotionally neutral context.

Strategic encoding and enhanced memory for positive value-location associations

“…Though participants in Experiment 2 were not found to have studied positive items longer than corresponding negative items, highly positive information was studied more frequently, for the same amount of time per study visit, compared to the other to-be-learned positive and negative information. An alternative explanation may be that the generally more arousing nature of negative information may have automatically captured participants' attention, compared to the less salient positive information, as found in an abundance of prior work (Bowen, Kark, & Kensinger, 2018;Carretié, Hinojosa, Martín-Loeches, Mercado, & Tapia, 2004;Clewett & Murty, 2019;Eastwood, Smilek, & Merikle, 2003;Hochman & Yechiam, 2011;Kensinger & Corkin, 2003a, 2003bMickley & Kensinger, 2008;Mickley Steinmetz & Kensinger, 2009;Siegel, Graup, & Castel, 2020). Participants may have therefore been required to utilize their top-down strategic control by allocating more frequent study visits to positive items to match the salience of the corresponding negative items, producing equivalent memory for items of these two valences.…”

Is the Future Bright or Bleak? Assessing Past and Future Outlooks Across the Adult Lifespan

“…The survey was given to 413 participants residing in the United States via CloudResearch’s MTurk Toolkit online platform ( https://www.cloudresearch.com/products/turkprime-mturk-toolkit/ ) that optimizes recruitment through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and aides in preventing data quality issues (e.g., fraud, inattentiveness; Litman et al, 2017 ). Such methods offer reliable and effective data collection for psychological research when compared to traditional in-lab testing for behavioral tasks ( Siegel et al, 2020 ). MTurk workers compared with a national U.S. census-matched normative sample supplied similar quality data across a variety of psychological dimensions while also uncovering characteristics of higher negative affect and lower social engagement ( McCredie & Morey, 2019 ).…”