The Influence of Emotional Valence on Age Differences in Early Processing and Memory

摘要

This study examined young and older adults’ attentional biases and subsequent incidental recognition memory for distracting positive, negative, and neutral words. Younger adults were more distracted by negative stimuli than by positive or neutral stimuli and they correctly recognized more negative than positive words. Older adults, however, attended equally to all stimuli yet showed reliable recognition only for positive words. Thus, although an attentional bias towards negative words carries over into recognition performance for younger adults, older adults’ bias appears to be limited to remembering positive information.