Age differences in memory for emotional messages: Do older people always remember the positive?

摘要

Theories and empirical research in the Western literature suggest that with age, people are more motivated to derive emotion meaning from life, and one way to do so is to disproportionably remember the positive in life. We examined this bias—known as the positivity bias—among younger (aged 18–27 years; n=91) and older (aged 52–85 years, n=94) Hong Kong Chinese, by presenting them with health-promoting messages that had the same content but different background music. We found that, in contrast to prior findings obtained in the West, older Hong Kong Chinese remembered the most information from messages with negative, relative to positive or neutral, background music. Younger adults did not show these biases.