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Good News
About Getting Old
We Don’t Remember the Bad Stuff So Well
Younger Adults Find it
Harder to Filter Out Negative Images
Aug. 8, 2003 – It sometimes seems like
every researcher in America is focusing on senior citizens and what
they are finding is bad news about what happens to us as we age. A
recent study, however, has found something good – older people are
much less likely to remember bad things than are younger people.
 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 appeared 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.
Article:
“Aging and Emotional Memory: The Forgettable Nature of Negative Images
for Older Adults,” Susan Turk Charles, Ph.D., University of
California, Irvine; Mara Mather, Ph.D., University of California,
Santa Cruz; and Laura L. Carstensen, Ph.D., Stanford University;
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 132. No. 2.
Full text of the
article
is available from the APA Public Affairs Office and
http://www.apa.org/journals/xge/press_releases/june_2003/xge1322310.html.
The American Psychological Association
(APA), in Washington, DC, is the largest scientific and professional
organization representing psychology in the United States and is the
world’s largest association of psychologists. APA’s membership
includes more than 150,000 researchers, educators, clinicians,
consultants and students. Through its divisions in 53 subfields of
psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian
provincial associations, APA works to advance psychology as a science,
as a profession and as a means of promoting human welfare. |
