The influence of emotional valence on age differences in early processing and memory.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 27
Description: A growing body of research suggests an age-related increase in the importance of positive emotional information, presumably due to older adults' desire to optimize current feelings. In the present study, older and younger adults' attentional biases and subsequent memory for positive, negative, and neutral information was examined in a procedure that required participants to ignore distracting emotional stimuli and then perform a subsequent recognition task for the ignored stimuli. Younger adults demonstrated an attentional bias for negative stimuli, but older adults attended equally to positive, negative, and neutral stimuli. However, a different pattern emerged in the recognition memory task. Although younger adults also demonstrated a bias to remember negative stimuli, older adults remembered positive stimuli better than negative and neutral stimuli. Thus, older adults' bias for positive emotional information appears to influence memory, but this bias cannot be detected early in the processing of emotional information.
Notes: Adviser:  Lynn Hasher.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-03, page: 0999.

MICR copy on microfiche (1 microfiche).