News Release

As we get older, memory accentuates the positive helping explain why aging can foster good feelings

Younger adults find it harder to filter out negative images

Peer-Reviewed Publication

American Psychological Association

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.

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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)

Susan Turk Charles can be reached by email at scharles@uci.edu or by phone at (949) 824-1450.

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.


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