Age, gender, and arousal in recognition of negative and neutral pictures 1 year later.

Abstract

Compared with nonarousing stimuli, arousing stimuli enhance memory performance. The most robust effects have been reported for negative stimuli, "the negativity effect," although a number of mediating factors prevent definitive conclusions, for example, age, gender, memory task, retention period, and alternative arousal measures. To clarify whether the negativity effect is robust across age, gender, and time, we studied incidental recognition of neutral and negative pictures from the International Affective Picture System (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1999) in healthy younger and older adults--women and men--after a 1-year retention interval. Memory performance was related to 2 arousal measures at encoding, skin conductance response (SCR), and intensity rating of unpleasantness. The results showed weaker overall memory performance for older adults compared with younger adults. The negativity effect on accuracy (d') was gender dependent and age independent. In contrast, the negativity effect on response bias (c) interacted with age, but not gender, being weaker for older adults. Despite significant differences in arousal (SCR and arousal rating) between negative and neutral pictures, the correlations between arousal measures and memory performance were weak. Controlling for age and gender, a small negative partial correlation was found between arousal ratings and accuracy. The results extend previous studies by relating long-term recognition to both age and gender as well as to arousal at encoding.

Impact of Negative Emotion on the Neural Correlates of Long-Term Recognition in Younger and Older Adults

“…However, a recent study from our lab with a retention interval of 1 year demonstrated better memory accuracy for negative compared to neutral scenes in both younger and older adults (Gavazzeni et al, 2012). This further highlights the importance of retention intervals and might reflect that very long-term consolidation of negative scenes may result in a re-established negativity effect in both age groups.…”

“…For the older group, however, it is difficult to state that increased right AMG activity for successfully recognized negative scenes compared with neutral scenes subtended a delayed negativity effect: Considering the discrimination findings, although performance seemed to stabilize compared to S2 in the old, and normalize compared to the younger group, the fact that performance was low prevents firm conclusions. However, a beneficial effect of AMG activity on performance can be hypothesized when considering hits only, where the negativity effect appeared at S3 in the older group (see also Gavazzeni et al, 2012). …”

“…Some research reveals a “positivity effect,” where positive events are enhanced and therefore better remembered, along with a reduced “negativity effect,” where negative events are more likely to be forgotten in older adults (Charles et al, 2003; Mather and Carstensen, 2005; Mather, 2008, 2012; Spaniol et al, 2008; Reed and Carstensen, 2012). However, while findings regarding the positivity effect converge toward a preservation of this effect in aging, results concerning the negativity effect are mixed, as several studies show a memory advantage of negative over neutral information also in older adults (Kensinger et al, 2002; Denburg et al, 2003; Otani et al, 2007; Murty et al, 2009; Gavazzeni et al, 2012). To our knowledge, only Waring and Kensinger (2009) have tested the effect of retention interval on emotional memory in aging.…”

Aging: Commentary: Change in Perceptions of Personality Disorder in Late Life: The View From Socioemotional Aging

“…Such effects have also been shown in certain picture memory tasks (Charles, Mather, & Carstensen, 2003). There have also been some discrepant findings (e.g., Grühn, Smith, & Baltes, 2005) and some controversy about whether positivity effects should be regarded only as Age × Valence interactions (Reed & Carstensen, 2012) or whether there may be important reasons to also consider offset in processing between positive/negative and neutral (Gavazzeni, Andersson, Bäckman, Wiens, & Fischer, 2012;Murphy & Isaacowitz, 2008). Nonetheless, this general framework has exerted a quite significant impact on the study of socioemotional aging and on emotion-cognition links in the context of age.…”

Recognizing images: The role of motivational significance, complexity, social content, age, and gender

“…Fifth, in future studies it would appear important to control in the analyses for potential differences in time spent on the self‐paced recognition task. Sixth, the role of physiological responses at stimulus encoding and recognition for memory performance would be another issue to investigate (Gavazzeni, Anderson, Bäckman, Wiens & Fischer, ; Hämmerer et al ., ). Finally, interpretation of the results regarding age‐related vs. cohort effects requires caution because of the cross‐sectional study design.…”