Emotional Causes and Consequences of Age Differences in Memory Specificity

 心理时间旅行（MTT）是指在心理上模拟发生在现在以外的时间的事件的能力，包括记住过去的事件和想象未来的事件。MTT被认为是一种独特的人类能力，通过将过去的经验与当前的感受和未来的意图联系起来，在自我控制，情绪调节和决策中起着至关重要的作用。拟议的研究测试的假设来自一个新的模型MTT和老化。简而言之，该模型预测，随着年龄的增长，情景记忆的下降，加上调节情绪的动机的增加，导致老年人构建过去的叙述，以及可能的未来，这些事件具有较少的感官和感知细节（较少情景），但更具自我相关性和意义（更多语义）。这些意义丰富的叙述减少了当前的消极情感体验，增加了积极情感。将进行三个实验来验证这些假设。在每个实验中，年轻人和老年人将被要求描述在不同的指令下发生或可能发生在他们身上的事件。实验1将测试是否指令集中在感官和知觉细节的经验矛盾地导致更多的负面情绪。实验2将测试保持积极情绪的指令是否会导致更多基于语义的叙述。实验3将直接操纵情绪，以确定积极的情绪状态是否会导致所描述的事件的情节性减少。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Mental Time Travel (MTT) refers to the ability to mentally simulate events that occur in times other than the present, and encompasses both remembering past events and imagining future ones. MTT is thought to be a uniquely human ability that plays a crucial role in self-control, emotion regulation, and decision-making, by linkng past experience with current feelings and future intention. The proposed research tests hypotheses derived from a new model of MTT and aging. In brief, the model predicts that the declines in episodic memory with age, combined with increases in motivation to regulate emotion, result in older adults constructing narratives of past, and possible future, events that have less sensory and perceptual detail (less episodic), but are more self-relevant and meaningful (more semantic). These meaning-rich narratives then decrease the current experience of negative affect and increase positive affect. Three experiments will be conducted to test these hypotheses. In each experiment, younger and older adults will be asked to describe events that did or might happen to them under different sets of instructions. Experiment 1 will test whether instructions that focus people on sensory and perceptual details of experiences paradoxically cause more negative moods. Experiment 2 will test whether instructions to maintain a positive mood will cause more semantically-based narratives. Experiment 3 will directly manipulate mood to determine if positive mood states cause decreases in the episodic nature of the described events.