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As we get older, memory accentuates the
positive helping explain why aging can foster good feelings
EurekAlert, June 1, 2003
WASHINGTON - Here's good news about aging: When it comes to remembering emotional images, we tend -- as we get older -- to do what the song said, and "accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative." Three California psychologists found that compared with younger adults, older adults recalled fewer negative than positive images. The memory bias favoring the recall of positive images increased in successively older age groups. The findings appear in the June issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA). Psychologists have
recently documented the tendency of older people to regulate their
emotions more effectively than younger people, by maintaining positive
feelings and lowering negative feelings. Researchers led by Susan Turk
Charles, Ph.D., of the University of California, Irvine, wanted to
understand how this happens -- and focused on the role of memory. Charles and her
colleagues conducted two studies to examine age differences in memory for
positive, negative and neutral images of people, animals, nature scenes
and inanimate objects. For example, among the "people" pictures,
a positive image showed a man and a young boy at the beach watching
seagulls overhead; a negative image showed a couple looking sorrowful as
they stand in a cemetery and stare down at a tombstone; and a neutral
image showed scuba divers checking their gear by the side of a dock. In both experiments,
the psychologists first showed participants the images. Next, they tested
recall (how many they remembered) and recognition memory (whether they
accurately picked what they saw from a larger group of images). The first study
tested 144 participants in groups of ages 18-29, 41-53 and 65-80. Older
adults recalled fewer negative images relative to positive and neutral
images. For the older adults, recognition memory also decreased for
negative pictures. As a result, the younger adults remembered the negative
pictures better. In a second study of
64 participants (divided equally between ages 19-30 and ages 63-86), the
authors ruled out mood as a contributing factor, by testing participants
for mood and depression before presenting the images. Mood affected
younger and older people alike, ruling it out as the reason why – again
-- the largest age-related differences in memory were for negative images.
Although both
younger and older adults spent more time viewing negative images, only the
younger group recalled and recognized them better. The research
supports the "socioemotional selectivity" theory that, as people
get older and become more aware of more limited time left in life, they
direct their attention to more positive thoughts, activities and memories.
"With age," write the authors, "people place increasingly
more value on emotionally meaningful goals and thus invest more cognitive
and behavioral resources in obtaining them." Physiology may aid the process. Dr. Mara Mather, an author of the article, and colleagues have done preliminary brain research suggesting that in older adults, the amygdala is activated equally to positive and negative images, whereas in younger adults, it is activated more to negative images. This suggests that older adults encode less information about negative images, which in turn would diminish recall. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging
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