The effects of emotional arousal and gender on the associative memory deficit of older adults

Abstract

In this study we assessed the potential moderating roles of stimulus type (emotionally arousing) and participants' characteristics (gender) in older adults' associative memory deficit. In two experiments, young and older participants studied lists that included neutral and emotionally arousing word pairs (positive and negative) and completed recognition tests for the words and their associations. In Experiment 1, the majority of the word pairs were composed of two nouns, whereas in Experiment 2 they were composed of adjective-noun pairs. The results extend evidence for older adults' associative deficit and suggest that older and younger adults' item memory is improved for emotionally arousing words. However, associative memory for the word pairs did not benefit (and even showed a slight decline) from emotionally arousing words, which was the case for both younger and older adults. In addition, in these experiments, gender appeared to moderate the associative deficit of older adults, with older males but not females demonstrating this deficit.Keywords Aging . Episodic memory . Associative memory . Gender . ArousalOne issue that continues to pervade aging research is the problem of fully explaining why episodic memory declines across the lifespan. It is essential to understand the nature of this decline in order to help older adults maintain functionality throughout their lives. Previous work has suggested a number of contributing factors to this episodic memory decline, including deficits in semantic processing, metamemory, and deliberate recollection (see Light, 1991). Other theories have suggested that episodic memory problems may be the result of global declines in functions such as processing speed (Salthouse, 1996), attentional resources (Craik, 1983(Craik, , 1986, or inhibitory control (Hasher & Zacks, 1988) that have broader consequences for cognition.Of particular interest in the present study is the reduced ability in later adulthood to properly bind and associate items at encoding and to retrieve those associations at a later time, suggested as one potential mechanism underlying age-related episodic memory decline (e.g., Chalfonte & Johnson, 1996;Naveh-Benjamin, 2000;Old & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008a). The aims of the present study were to assess the effect of emotional arousal on the associative-binding deficit of older adults and to consider potential gender differences that may exist in older adults' associative memory. Each of these issues will be addressed in turn. Associative-binding deficit and episodic memory in agingChalfonte and Johnson (1996) investigated memory for complex events and their individual features in young and older adults. Their results showed a disproportionate decline in the older adult group for memories involving the binding of stimulus features (a picture, its color, and its location) relative to the decline in memory for each separate feature. This finding is in line with Naveh-Benjamin's (2000) associative-deficit hypothesis, which claims that a central factor in episo...

The role of attention in the associative binding of emotionally arousing words

“…It was predicted that a trade-off in memory for emotional items and associations would be observed and that it would reflect a benefit of emotional over neutral item memory but no difference (or a trade-off) between neutral and emotional associations when encoding and retrieval occurred under full attention (e.g., Naveh-Benjamin et al, 2012;Pierce & Kensinger, 2011). Furthermore, if memory for negative stimuli benefits in part from automatic processing (e.g., Pottage & Schaefer, 2012), negative EEM may be preserved under divided attention during encoding, but positive EEM may be reduced or eliminated for items and associations.…”

“…This finding is termed emotionally enhanced memory (EEM; Talmi, Schimmack, Paterson, & Moscovitch, 2007) and has been observed across numerous experimental manipulations (see Kensinger, 2009, for a review). Although robust, EEM is sometimes eliminated or reversed in situations that demand associative binding between two emotional items (e.g., Naveh-Benjamin, Maddox, Jones, Old, & Kilb, 2012;Pierce & Kensinger, 2011) or between emotional and neutral items (e.g., Nashiro & Mather, 2011).…”

The Effects of Aging on Associative Memory for Socially Meaningful Information

“…Older adults not only encounter a decline in binding items of information into associations at encoding, but also experience difficulty in retrieving the associations. This has recently been described as the Associative Deficit Hypothesis, or ADH (Chalfonte & Johnsons, 1996;Naveh-Benjamin, 2000). However, empirical evidence concerning ADH leaves gaps in potentially important manipulations and novel systems that may, or may not, be affected with aging, including social processing.…”

“…Through aging, this binding process degrades and can be detrimental to overall life quality. It is important to note that the memory for item location is one example of several associations that can be made on a daily basis, whether the association be between an item and its context as just described, or simply two items, two contexts, or even two general mental codes (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000).…”

“…Though familiarity and recollection for the pairs tended to increase across both age groups, the rate of correct recall in older adults was impaired in comparison to younger adults (Light et al 2004). ADH has further been extended to intra-item stimuli such as words presented in a specific font or color (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000). Participants were prompted to encode words in differing fonts (a word-font association).…”