Bringing positive and negative events to mind: Effects of age on emotional memory retrieval

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PROJECT SUMMARY The details we bring to mind about past positive and negative events can have important implications for our mental wellbeing, affecting how we see ourselves and maintain relationships with others. Do we vividly remember an argument with a friend, or the heartfelt apology that followed? Do we remember the feeling of accomplishment after giving a talk, or our struggle to answer an audience member’s question? The details we bring to mind also can affect our decision-making, with consequences for our social networks and career success: Will we call that friend again? Will we agree to give a talk at an upcoming meeting? There are fascinating examples that suggest that what emotional details we remember from past events may vary, in part, with a person’s age. Older age is associated with a greater use of positive (vs. negative) words in descriptions of past events (Pennebaker & Stone, 2003; Ford et al., 2016), and with a greater reported focus on positive aspects of otherwise challenging situations (Ford et al., 2018a, b). Yet we understand little about why such differences arise, and the answer is likely to have implications for understanding how cognition-emotion links differ across the adult lifespan and how adults of various ages achieve mental wellbeing. The first aims of this research are to understand these differences upon initial retrieval, focusing on memory phenomenology (Aim 1) and neural representations (Aim 2). Using multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA), we examine two types of recapitulation: trial-specific (tied to each specific encoded event) and valence-generalized (shared across stimuli of a particular valence category). We hypothesize that, with older age, memory representations will have more valence-generalized vs. trial-specific recapitulation, and this age-related difference will be most pronounced for memories of positive content. We anticipate this will be reflected in positive memories feeling subjectively vivid to older adults, while lacking in specific detail. A key feature of episodic memory is that it is not a static representation. The details we remember now are not necessarily the details we will remember later, though the way we represent a memory now can tip the scales, making some details more likely to come to mind later and others more likely to be omitted. For emotional memories, our recent research and preliminary data suggest that retrieval at one time-point may trigger the start of what could colloquially be thought of as a “virtuous-memory-cycle”, with positive details emphasized and negative details de-emphasized, or the opposite, a “vicious-memory-cycle.” Critically, we hypothesize that older age increases the likelihood of a “virtuous-memory-cycle.” We propose that age-related differences in memory representations make it particularly likely that older adults’ initial retrieval of positive content impairs their ability to later remember related, negative content (Aim 3) and leads to broader age- related differences in the details accessed over successive retrievals such that, over repeated retrievals, older age is associated with memories that become more positive (Aim 4).