ABSTRACT

Background: The effects of emotional stimuli on memory in older adults are often addressed in terms of socio-emotional selectivity theory and the valence dimension. Older adults usually remember positive stimuli better than negative stimuli. However, studies examining the effects of discrete emotions on the elderly are still limited. The present study examined the effects of negative and positive discrete emotions (fear, disgust, and happiness) on recognition memory of older and younger adults.

Method: In the encoding phase, participants studied happiness-, disgust-, fear-, and neutral- related photos while doing a line discrimination task that assessed their attention. After 45 minutes, they completed an old/new recognition memory test on a confidence rating scale and also rated self-relevance of photos.

Results: Younger participants showed a more liberal response bias for disgust- and fear-related stimuli, and were also more accurate in recognizing disgust-related photos compared to others. Older adults showed a more liberal bias only for disgust-related stimuli, however, their recognition accuracy did not differ across emotion categories.

Conclusion: These results suggested that the effect of disgust-related stimuli on recognition memory may decrease with age and emotion effects cannot solely be accounted for by the valence/arousal dimensions.

摘要

背景：情绪刺激对老年人记忆的影响通常是根据社会情感选择性理论和化合价维度来解决的。老年人通常记得积极刺激要比消极刺激好。但是，研究离散情绪对老年人的影响的研究仍然很有限。本研究研究了负面和正面离散情绪（恐惧，厌恶和幸福）对老年人和年轻人认知记忆的影响。

方法：在编码阶段，参与者在进行线条识别任务以评估他们的注意力时，研究了与幸福，厌恶，恐惧和中立相关的照片。45分钟后，他们以置信度等级完成了新旧识别记忆测试，并对照片的自我相关性进行了评估。

结果：与其他人相比，年轻的参与者对厌恶和恐惧相关的刺激表现出更为自由的反应偏见，并且在识别与厌恶相关的照片上也更加准确。老年人仅对厌恶相关的刺激表现出更大的偏见，但是，他们的识别准确性在不同的情感类别中并没有不同。

结论：这些结果表明，与厌恶有关的刺激对识别记忆的作用可能随着年龄的增长而降低，而情绪的影响不能仅由价/原子尺寸来解释。