Executive function and emotional focus in autobiographical memory specificity in older adults

Abstract

The current study examined the role of executive function in retrieval of specific autobiographical memories in older adults with regard to control of emotion during retrieval. Older and younger adults retrieved memories of specific events in response to emotionally positive, negative and neutral word cues. Contributions of inhibitory and updating elements of executive function to variance in autobiographical specificity were assessed to determine processes involved in the commonly found age-related reduction in specificity. A negative relationship between age and specificity was only found in retrieval to neutral cues. Alternative explanations of this age preservation of specificity of emotional recall are explored, within the context of control of emotion in the self-memory system and preserved emotional processing and positivity effect in older adults. The pattern of relationships suggests updating, rather than inhibition, as the source of age-related reduction in specificity, but that emotional processing (particularly of positively valenced memories) is not influenced by age-related variance in executive control. The tendency of older adults to focus on positive material may thus act as a buffer against detrimental effects of reduced executive function capacity on autobiographical retrieval, representing a possible target for interventions to improve specificity of autobiographical memory retrieval in older adults.

Age effects in autobiographical memory depend on the measure

“…In particular, and consistent with previous findings, age-related deficits were observed for episodic free recall (e.g. Bouazzaoui, Fay, Taconnat, Angel, Vanneste & Isingrini, 2013;Craik, Byrd & Swanson, 1987) and word-cued autobiographical recall (Beaman et al, 2007;Holland et al, 2012;Ros et al, 2009). Moreover, scores on these two tasks were correlated, but were not related to performance on the other episodic tasks, which suggests that there are features common to episodic free recall and word-cued AM that are not shared, or are shared to a lesser extent, with the other measures.…”

The influence of eating psychopathology on autobiographical memory specificity and social problem-solving

“…There is considerable evidence that executive processes play a key role in the retrieval of specific event memories (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2001) and have been implicated in the AMS deficits shown in depressed patients (Dalgleish et al, 2007), patients with PTSD (Dalgleish et al, 2008) and older adults (Holland, Ridout, Geraghty & Walford, 2012). Given that impaired executive function has been reported in patients with eating disorders (Allen et al, 2013;Kemps et al, 2006) and in participants who might be considered at risk of developing an eating disorder (Green et al, 2003;Kemps & Tiggemann, 2005) it is plausible that the deficit in AMS observed in the current study might be a consequence of reduced executive function in those with elevated EDI scores.…”

Do strategic processes contribute to the specificity of future simulation in depression?

“…Importantly, the control group had significantly lower scores on the BDI-II, t(27.05) = À5.92, p < .001, and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI; Beck, Epstein, Brown, & Steer, 1988), t(26.01) = À6.01, p < .001, relative to the depressive group, scoring below the cut-off for mild depression (scores <14) and anxiety (scores <8). Power analyses were conducted using G*Power (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007) on the basis of published effect sizes for group differences in executive function (Study 1, Dalgleish et al, 2007) and specificity (Study 1, Dalgleish et al, 2007), correlations of executive measures with specificity (Study 2, Dalgleish et al, 2007), and regressions including specificity as the outcome measure and executive measures as predictors (Holland, Ridout, Walford, & Geraghty, 2012). These analyses indicated that a minimum of 24 participants per group were needed to achieve 80% power at a = .05 across all of these key analyses.…”