The Positivity Effect and Auditory Recognition Memory for Musical Excerpts in Young, Middle-Aged, and Older Adults

The term "positivity effect" was coined to describe older adults' preferential processing of positive information over negative information in visual memory recognition studies (Reed & Carstensen, 2012). The socioemotional selectivity theory (Carstensen, 1995) postulates that, as a result of changes in motivation toward future goals, emotional priorities change over the life span. Young adults and those who perceive no limitation of time are motivated to expand their horizons in terms of acquiring information and broadening their number of social contacts. Older adults and those who perceive limitations in their time remaining are motivated to focus on the present and narrow their social contacts to meaningful relationships with family and close friends (Carstensen, 2006). The shift in goals contributes to differences in how information is processed. Socioemotional selectivity theory predicts that because of this shift over time, older adults will prefer processing positive information rather than negative information in contrast to the preferences of younger adults (Reed, Chan, & Mikels, 2014).The positivity effect has been widely demonstrated in memory recognition studies using visual stimuli (Charles, Mather, & Carstensen, 2003; Mather & Carstensen, 2003; Mickley, Steinmetz, Muscatell, & Kensinger, 2010; Mikels, Larken, ReuterLorenz, & Carstensen, 2005; Spaniol, Voss & Grady, 2008). The positivity effect in terms of emotion perception by older adults has also been found in studies using auditory stimuli, specifically music. Laukka and Juslin (2007) examined age-related differences in emotion recognition as expressed in speech and music. Older adults were less accurate in their recognition of negative emotion expression than positive for speech and music stimuli. Lima and Castro (2011) further examined age-related changes in emotion recognition expressed by music. Participants ranging in age from 17- 84 years were asked to listen to musical excerpts portraying happiness, sadness, scariness, and peacefulness. They were then asked to rank how much each excerpt represented each emotional quality. An age-related difference was noted, with older adults not as responsive to sad and scary music as young adults. No agerelated difference was noted for happy and peaceful music. Vieillard, Didierjean, and Maquestiaux (2012) examined age-related differences in determining complexity in the perception of valence and arousal while listening to excerpts of film music. Older adults did not rate peaceful and threatening excerpts as significantly different. The older adults may not have found the threatening music to be stimulating and may have paid less attention to negatively arousing stimuli as a way of controlling their emotional responses to the music (Vieillard et al., 2012). In sum, the results of studies using visual as well as auditory stimuli provide support for the positivity effect because older adults were more responsive to stimuli representing positive emotions than they were to stimuli representing negative emotions. The goal of the present study was to examine the presence of the positivity effect in recognition memory for music.There were three objectives for the current study. The first objective was to investigate age-related differences in the interaction between emotion and cognition based on recognition of emotionally valenced musical stimuli. The precise goal of the study was to examine if the positivity effect based on the socioemotional selectivity theory (Carstensen, 1992) would be generalized to recognition memory in an auditory domain, specifically music. Young, middle-aged, and older adults listened to carefully chosen musical excerpts for later recognition memory, in addition to completing cognitive tests and measures of affect. We hypothesized that if older adults in the sample demonstrated the positivity effect for recognition memory of musical excerpts, they would recognize proportionally more of the pleasant excerpts than they would the unpleasant. …