Retirement through rose-colored glasses: greater positivity bias in retired relative to working older adults

Abstract

Retirement is a period of significant change, as older adults transition from a lifetime of work to unstructured leisure time. This sudden shift in activity may have drastic consequences on cognition and disease risk. Retirement has been associated with declines in memory beyond typical age-related memory decline and may continue to deteriorate steadily the longer older adults remain retired. Mnemonic discrimination tasks have been developed that provide a more sensitive measure of age-related memory decline compared to traditional memory tasks by taxing hippocampal pattern separation, or the process of reducing interference across similar experiences. While older adults are more susceptible to interference in memory, positive experiences tend to be better remembered. The socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that awareness of a limited remaining lifespan leads older adults to prioritize positive experiences to facilitate emotional well-being. Therefore, retired older adults may be more susceptible to the positivity effect in aging. Here, we utilized an emotional mnemonic discrimination task to examine how retirement influences emotional memory. We found that retired older adults show selective impairments for mnemonic discrimination relative to standard memory measures, and a larger positivity effect in memory compared to their age-matched working peers. However, subjective memory complaints, job stress, and depressive symptoms impacted these relationships depending on retirement status. These findings are in line with the socioemotional selectivity theory, in which retirement may be associated with a prioritization of positive experiences; however, it is unclear whether this effect is compensatory or perhaps an indicator of age-related memory dysfunction.