Ah, Yes, I Remember It Well: The Impacts of Age on Memory for Emotional Stimuli

Abstract

As people age, cognitive abilities decline, while emotional processing abilities remain intact, or even improve (e.g., Fung & Carstensen, 2003). This experiment examined the influence of emotion on the recall of false semantic memories in older adults. The participants were a group of older adults (N= 32; range= 64-92 years) and a complementary group of younger adults (N=33; range= 18-27 years). All participants completed an adapted version of the Deese/Roediger/McDermott (1995) task that incorporated words of varying emotional valence, to examine their levels of true and false memory for auditory stimuli. Older adults demonstrated more false memory for positively-valenced stimuli. The implications of these results are discussed with respect to changes in emotional processing across the life-span.