Effects of positive personal and non-personal autobiographical stimuli on emotional regulation in older adults

Abstract

People can regulate negative emotional states using personal episodic information stored in memory. However, amongst older adults, assistance in retrieving personal memories might be needed. As such, positive personal images might better facilitate the retrieval of positive personal memories, relative to generic positive images. The present study induced older adults (N = 40; M age = 76.28) into a negative mood state using a validated film clip ("Dead Man Walking"; Robbins et al. in Dead Man Walking [Cinta Cinematográfica]. PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, Working Title Films, Estados Unidos, 1995). Participants were then shown positive personal images (album photos) or positive non-personal images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) and between-group differences in their mood state and their ability to retrieve positive autobiographical memories were measured. Although participants' moods decreased after the negative mood induction, their mood then recovered after picture cuing regardless of whether images were personal or non-personal. Furthermore, the positive mood evoked by non-personal, but not personal, images was significantly positively associated with self-reported feelings of reliving of the memories evoked by those images. These results suggest that, when pictures from personal life are not available, the selection of images able to generate positive autobiographical memories with a sense of reliving, is a feasible tool for older adult's emotional regulation.Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Gradual positive and negative affect induction: The effect of verbalizing affective content

“…habituation effects (e.g., [43]) might reduce the effectivity of the stimuli, while recency bias (e.g., [44]) might enhance the effect of the last (few) affective pictures. However, showing affective IAPS pictures in a fixed (or non-incremental) order is not uncommon, and has been shown to effectively induce desired emotions and affective states (e.g., [15,45,46]). Therefore, while we acknowledge this limitation, we do not think the incremental nature of the stimuli is responsible for the absence of an effect of, for example, the positive condition.…”

A multi-method comparison of autobiographical memory impairments amongst younger and older adults

“…In particular, older adults have difficulty recalling events from their past that lasted for less than 24 hours (e.g., when I attended my daughters' 20 th birthday party) and instead tend to retrieve general memories: memories for events that occurred multiple times (e.g., my daughters' birthday parties) or which occurred over extended periods of time (e.g., when my daughter was travelling during her twenties). This is important because the ability to retrieve specific memories has been suggested to help older adults regulate negative moods (Carretero, Latorre, Fernández, Barry, & Ricarte, 2019) and difficulty retrieving specific memories has been associated with the presence and severity of depression (Farina, Barry, Van Damme, van Hie, & Raes, 2018;Ono, Devilly, & Shum, 2015;Van Vreeswijk & De Wilde, 2004). Although autobiographical memory impairments and their association with depression in older adults has been widely researched (Wilson & Gregory, 2018), there are limitations to existing studies that must be overcome in order for us to better understand these problems and to inform the development of interventions to improve them (e.g., Leahy, Ridout, Mushtaq, & Holland, 2017).…”

Exploring the Link Between Self-compassion and Compulsive Exercise Amongst Women

“…Both PROMIS scales have previously been used in Spanish populations, with good reliability (e.g. Carretero et al, 2020). In this study, the PROMIS-Anxiety and PROMIS-Depression scales had a Cronbach alpha of 0.90 and 0.93, respectively.…”