Friend or foe? Decoding the facilitative and disruptive effects of emotion on working memory in younger and older adults

Linda Truong,Lixia Yang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00094

Abstract

A growing body of work on emotion-cognition interactions has revealed both facilitative and disruptive effects of emotion on working memory in younger adults. These differing effects may vary by the goal relevancy of emotion within a task. Additionally, it is possible that these emotional effects would be larger for older adults, considering findings of preserved emotional processing with age. To test these hypotheses, the current study examined the effects of emotional content and aging on working memory for target information in the presence of distraction. Thirty-six younger (ages 18–29) and 36 older adults (ages 65–87) completed a delayed-response working memory task. Participants viewed two target words intermixed with two distracter words, and then judged whether a subsequently presented probe word was one of the target words. The emotional content (valence and arousal) of targets and distracters was systematically manipulated. Results indicated that emotional targets facilitated working memory in both age groups. In contrast, emotional distracters disrupted performance. Negative distracters were particularly disruptive for older adults, but younger adults did not show an emotional interference effect. These findings help clarify discrepancies in the literature and contribute to the sparse research on emotional working memory in older adults.

Highlights

The ability to successfully complete a task—such as driving—requires focused attention on task-relevant information, like traffic lights, and limited attention to task-irrelevant distraction, such as roadside advertisements
To examine differential emotional effects of goal-relevant target vs. goal-irrelevant distracting information, response times (RTs) and accuracy in the working memory task were analyzed with mixed analyses of variance (ANOVAs)
All other effects were not significant (Fs < 1.06, ps > 0.35). To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine how the effects of emotional content on working memory vary according to goal relevancy and age

Summary

Introduction

The ability to successfully complete a task—such as driving—requires focused attention on task-relevant information, like traffic lights, and limited attention to task-irrelevant distraction, such as roadside advertisements. According to the inhibitory deficit theory, age-related deficits in inhibition—the ability to avoid or remove distracting information from working memory—reduces the ability to focus attention on task-relevant information, lowering overall working memory performance (i.e., slower and/or less accurate responses) (Hasher and Zacks, 1988). In contrast to this decline, processing of emotional information is preserved in old age (see Scheibe and Carstensen, 2010 for a review). These findings raise an important question: how is working memory influenced by emotional information in older adults? would older adults’ preserved emotional processing lead to working memory enhancements or would it further impair performance?

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion