No aging bias favoring memory for positive material: Evidence from a heterogeneity-homogeneity list paradigm using emotionally toned words.

Grühn, Daniel; Smith, Jacqui; Baltes, Paul B.

doi:10.1037/0882-7974.20.4.579

Cited by 175 publications

(169 citation statements)

References 46 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

141

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…While the results of this and many other studies (Knight et al, 2007;Kwon et al, 2009;Mather and Carstensen, 2005) indicate a positivity bias in older adults, this effect is not always seen (e.g., Grühn et al, 2005;Isaacowitz et al, 2006). The emergence of the positivity effect can be reversed when attentional resources become limited for example (Knight et al, 2007), perhaps indicating that emotional goals are prioritized only when there are enough attentional resources available.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

Healthy aging is associated with increased neural processing of positive valence but attenuated processing of emotional arousal: an fMRI study

Kehoe

Toomey²,

Balsters

et al. 2013

Neurobiology of Aging

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Arousal and valence play key roles in emotional perception, with normal aging leading to changes in the neural substrates supporting valence processing. The objective of this study was to investigate normal age-related changes in the neural substrates of emotional arousal processing. Twenty-three young and 23 older, healthy women underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging as they viewed images which were neutral or positive in valence and which varied in arousal level from low to high. Using a parametric modulation approach, we examined how the blood oxygen-level dependent signal varied with single trial subjective ratings of valence and arousal, and whether this differed with age. In accordance with previous studies we found that the older group showed greater activation in response to positive valence, in the left amygdala, left middle temporal gyrus and right lingual gyrus. In contrast however, they showed reduced reactivity to emotional arousal, in occipital and temporal visual cortices bilaterally, the left inferior parietal cortex, and the supplementary motor area bilaterally. This study represents the first of its kind to clearly dissociate how aging affects the neural correlates of emotional arousal and valence. The changes in arousal processing may in part be mediated by the functional reorganization evident in the aging brain, such as reduced activation of the posterior cortices as described by the posterior-anterior shift in ageing (PASA) effect.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

Healthy aging is associated with increased neural processing of positive valence but attenuated processing of emotional arousal: an fMRI study

Kehoe

Toomey²,

Balsters

et al. 2013

Neurobiology of Aging

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, some studies suggest that there is a "positivity effect," where older adults may be more likely to attend to and remember positive information (Mather and Carstensen 2005;Wong et al 2012). On the other hand, some studies have suggested that older adults are biased toward remembering negative details (Kensinger et al 2007) or show no evidence of such an age-related positivity bias (Grühn et al 2005;Fernandes et al 2008). One potential source of conflict is that aging is not a uniform phenomenon and individual differences are frequently observed in older adults.…”

mentioning

confidence: 84%

Positivity effect specific to older adults with subclinical memory impairment

et al. 2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Numerous studies have suggested that older adults preferentially remember positive information ("positivity effect"), however others have reported mixed results. One potential source of conflict is that aging is not a unitary phenomenon and individual differences exist. We modified a standard neuropsychological test to vary emotional content and tested memory at three time points (immediate/20 min/1 wk). Cognitively normal older adults were stratified into those with and without subclinical memory impairment. We found that the positivity effect was limited to those with subclinical memory impairment, suggesting that consideration of subclinical memory impairment is necessary for understanding age-related emotional memory alterations.[Supplemental material is available for this article.]Increasing age is the greatest risk factor for developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) (Thies and Bleiler 2011). Thus, it is vital to understand neurocognitive changes that occur during the aging process to identify early phenotypes that may be associated with later cognitive decline. Memory impairment is one of the hallmark cognitive dysfunctions in healthy aging and is a major symptom of MCI and AD. There is extensive evidence that episodic memory, or memory for events, generally declines with age (Craik and Simon 1980;Glisky 2007). However, some studies suggest that there is a "positivity effect," where older adults may be more likely to attend to and remember positive information (Mather and Carstensen 2005;Wong et al. 2012). On the other hand, some studies have suggested that older adults are biased toward remembering negative details (Kensinger et al. 2007) or show no evidence of such an age-related positivity bias (Grühn et al. 2005;Fernandes et al. 2008). One potential source of conflict is that aging is not a uniform phenomenon and individual differences are frequently observed in older adults.There are numerous approaches to examining individual differences with age. One such approach dichotomizes older rats into two groups (Gallagher et al. 1993). One group of older rats performs on par with young rats on the Morris Water Maze (i.e., "aged-unimpaired"-AU), while another group performs outside of the range of young rat performance (i.e., "aged-impaired"-AI). This approach has been used to examine the aged brain in which this dichotomy maps onto neurobiological alterations associated with medial temporal lobe dysfunction, including synaptic loss in the perforant path (Smith et al. 2000), loss of inhibitory tone (Spiegel et al. 2013), hyperexcitability in the CA3 subregion of the hippocampus (Wilson et al. 2004(Wilson et al. , 2005, as well as loss of reelin and increased phosphorylated tau expression in the lateral entorhinal cortex (Stranahan et al. 2011). In humans, we have used a similar approach and have found that individual differences in age-related memory impairment (as defined by performance on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test-RAVLT, a word-list learning task) was associated w...

show abstract

“…finding of a greater bias or positivity eVect for mixed lists relative to lists that contain only positive or negative information (e.g., Grü hn, Smith, & Baltes, 2005). However, although emotional materials lend themselves well to the model in terms of evaluative processing and priority, in the following section other domains of impaired memory performance will be covered, in order to illustrate how the evaluative processing (as described in the model) can account for some important findings in the literature, especially in terms of the strategic control that is used by older adults.…”

Section: O R R E C T E D P R O O Fmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Adaptive and Strategic Use of Memory By Older Adults: Evaluative Processing and Value-Directed Remembering

Castel¹

2007

Psychology of Learning and Motivation

163

217

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Why do we remember some events and not others, and how does this change in old age? Although there are a variety of ways to address this question, the present perspective emphasizes how value can have a profound eVect on how we use our memory to remember certain information. The ability to select and prioritize what information is important to remember, relative to less salient or peripheral information, is an essential skill for the eYcient use of memory. For example, university students seek to memorize information they think is important for a later test, while grandparents may focus on being able to remember information about children and grandchildren, as well as important life events. In both cases, value is used to direct resources toward information that is deemed to be important to remember. The role that value plays in memory performance is critical to develop a comprehensive understanding of how memory is used across the adult life span.The present summary focuses on how older adults use evaluative processing (a critical process that will be defined and discussed throughout this chapter) to guide encoding and retrieval operations, and how older adults then use value to make decisions about what information is important to remember. In light of the many memory impairments that typically THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING

show abstract

No aging bias favoring memory for positive material: Evidence from a heterogeneity-homogeneity list paradigm using emotionally toned words.

Cited by 175 publications

References 46 publications

Healthy aging is associated with increased neural processing of positive valence but attenuated processing of emotional arousal: an fMRI study

Healthy aging is associated with increased neural processing of positive valence but attenuated processing of emotional arousal: an fMRI study

Positivity effect specific to older adults with subclinical memory impairment

The Adaptive and Strategic Use of Memory By Older Adults: Evaluative Processing and Value-Directed Remembering

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About