Memory for Contextual Details: Effects of Emotion and Aging.

Abstract

When individuals are confronted with a complex visual scene that includes some emotional element, memory for the emotional component often is enhanced, whereas memory for peripheral (nonemotional) details is reduced. The present study examined the effects of age and encoding instructions on this effect. With incidental encoding instructions, young and older adults showed this pattern of results, indicating that both groups focused attention on the emotional aspects of the scene. With intentional encoding instructions, young adults no longer showed the effect: They were just as likely to remember peripheral details of negative images as of neutral images. The older adults, in contrast, did not overcome the attentional bias: They continued to show reduced memory for the peripheral elements of the emotional compared with the neutral scenes, even with the intentional encoding instructions.

Effects of emotion on item and source memory in young and older adults

“…Aging has little impact on skin conductance and subjective reactions to emotional experiences (David, Littrell, Kaszniak, & Nielsen, 2002;Levenson, Carstensen, Friesen, & Ekman, 1991;Levine & Bluck, 1997;Malatesta & Kalnok, 1984), and despite poorer item memory overall, older adults show a benefit of emotion on item memory that is similar to, if not greater than, that for young people (Carstensen & TurkCharles, 1994;Charles, Mather, & Carstensen, 2003;Denberg, Buchanan, Tranel, & Adolphs, 2003;Kensinger, Brierley, Medford, Growdon, & Corkin, 2002;Kensinger et al, 2005;Leigland, Schulz, & Janowsky, 2004;Yoder & Elias, 1987).…”

“…In most, participants have studied pictures, some that have featured emotional stimuli or situations in the foreground (e.g., a car accident or a surgical operation) and others that have been neutral. Although some studies have supported the Easterbrook (1959) claim by showing that memory for background information is poorer for emotional pictures than for neutral ones (e.g., Burke, Heuer, & Reisberg, 1992;Christianson & Loftus, 1987Kensinger, Piguet, Krendl, & Corkin, 2005), others have, instead, supported the tick rate hypothesis (Kahneman, 1973;Revelle & Loftus, 1992) by showing that background information is remembered better in emotional pictures than in neutral ones (e.g., Heuer & Reisberg, 1990;Libkuman, Nichols-Whitehead, Griffith, & Thomas, 1999; see also Wessel, van der Kooy, & Merckelbach, 2000, for inconsistent results within the same set of experiments). One possible reason for the mixed findings is that in these paradigms, it is often difficult to define and distinguish central from peripheral features.…”

Emotion processing effects on interference resolution in working memory.

“…For example, source memory accuracy for the font color of emotional words, or for the cognitive operations performed during encoding, is higher for emotional words than for neutral words (Doerksen & Shimamura, 2001;Kensinger & Corkin, 2003;Kensinger, Piguet, Krendl, & Corkin, 2005). Other studies have failed to replicate these findings, however, suggesting that any enhancement may be task-specific (Mather, 2007).…”

“…Taken together, research studies investigating the influence of emotion on attention and source memory (Doerksen & Shimamura, 2001;Kensinger & Corkin, 2003;Kensinger et al, 2005) suggest that the enhanced contextual detail provided by emotional content will aid interference resolution when task requirements involve focusing attention on emotional stimulus domains, and impair interference resolution when task requirements involve focusing attention on nonemotional stimulus domains.…”

Aging, self-referencing, and medial prefrontal cortex

“…In young adults, distinct but adjacent regions of medial prefrontal cortex respond to the degree of self-descriptiveness (i.e., medial prefrontal) and the valence of information (i.e., ventral anterior cingulate cortex; Moran et al, 2006). Because emotional information differentially captures the attention of young and elderly (Charles, Mather, & Carstensen, 2003;Kensinger, Piguet, Krendl, & Corkin, 2005;Mather & Carstensen, 2005), comparisons of valence allow us to assess the degree to which emotion contributes to self-referencing across the age groups.…”