How list composition affects the emotional enhancement of memory in younger and older adults.

Young adults show an immediate emotional enhancement of memory (EEM) when emotional and non-emotional information are presented in mixed lists but not pure lists, but it is unclear whether older adults' memories also benefit from the cognitive factors producing the list-composition effect. The present study examined whether the list-composition effect extended to older adults (55+), testing the following alternatives: (1) younger and older adults could show the list-composition effect, (2) due to age-related decreases in cognitive resources, older adults may show weaker effects of list-composition, or (3) due to age-related positivity effects, older adults' list-composition effect may vary by valence. Results supported the first alternative: the list-composition effect occurred for older as well as younger adults, when testing memory for pictures (Experiment 1) or words (Experiment 2). In a third experiment, we explored whether mixing information at only encoding or retrieval (and blocking in the other phase) would suffice for the list composition effect to occur. Results revealed that mixed encoding/blocked retrieval did not elicit the EEM in either age group. Overall, the results suggest age-related stability in the cognitive processes that give rise to the immediate EEM.

Perceived event resolution-rather than time-allows older adults to reduce the negativity of their memories.

In addition to showing greater memory positivity soon after negative events, older adults can be more likely than younger adults to show decreases in memory negativity as events grow more distant. We recently showed that this latter effect was not present when adults were asked to rate memories of the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (March-May 2020): after a short (June/July 2020) and long delay (October/November 2020), older age was associated with greater reflections on positive aspects, but with no difference in negative aspects. We suggested that older adults did not show decreased negativity because the pandemic was still prevalent in their daily lives. The present study examines whether perceived event resolution-rather than time on its own-may be necessary to show age-related decreases in negativity by surveying participants during a time when many may have felt like the pandemic had resolved (Summer 2021). Once again, age was associated with increased ratings of the positive aspects, but at this timepoint, age was also associated with decreased ratings of the negative aspects. These results suggest that older adults may more successfully decrease the negativity of their memories compared to younger adults only when they feel that events have resolved.

With age comes well-being: older age associated with lower stress, negative affect, and depression throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objectives: Despite initial concerns about older adult's emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, reports from the first months of the pandemic suggested that older adults were faring better than younger adults, reporting lower stress, negative affect, depression, and anxiety. In this study, we examined whether this pattern would persist as the pandemic progressed.Method: A convenience sample of 1,171 community-dwelling adults in the United States, ages 18-90, filled out surveys on various metrics of emotional well-being starting in March 2020 and at various time points through April 2021. We created time bins to account for the occurrence of significant national events, allowing us to determine how age would relate to affective outcomes when additional national-level emotional events were overlaid upon the stress of the pandemic.Results: Older age was associated with lower stress, negative affect, and depressive symptomatology, and with higher positive affect, and this effect was consistent across time points measured from March, 2020 through April, 2021. Age was less associated with measures of worry and social isolation, but older adults were more worried about their personal health throughout the pandemic.Conclusion: These results are consistent with literature suggesting that older age is associated with increased resilience in the face of stressful life experiences and show that this pattern may extend to resilience in the face of a prolonged real-world stressor.Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13607863.2021.2010183 .

Older adults remember more positive aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The initial phase of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic changed our lives dramatically, with stay-at-home orders and extreme physical distancing requirements. The present study suggests that how adults remember these disruptions depends, in part, on their age. In two surveys collected from American and Canadian participants during Summer 2020 (n = 551) and Fall 2020 (n = 506), older age (across ages 18-90 years) was associated with greater reflections on positive aspects of the initial phase of the pandemic. While the pandemic is a shared experience, the way it is remembered may differ across generations, with older age leading to a greater focus on the positive aspects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The relation between age and experienced stress, worry, affect, and depression during the spring 2020 phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

Advanced age is often associated with increased emotional well-being, with older adults reporting more positive and less negative affect than younger adults. Here, we test whether this pattern held during the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic that disproportionately put older adults at risk. We additionally examine potential moderating effects of daily activity and social connectedness, which have been shown to benefit mental health across the life span. We regularly assessed a large sample of adults ages 18-89 using online surveys. As preregistered for this report (https://osf.io/tb4qv), we focus on self-reported measures of affect, depression, stress, and worry as well as self-reported daily activity and perception of social isolation during two time windows for adults in the United States: early (mid-March to early April) and later (mid-April to early May) periods during the spring phase of the pandemic. Increased age benefited emotional well-being for multiple metrics during both time windows assessed. Furthermore, the results confirmed that exercise and perception of social connectedness can buffer against negative mental health outcomes across all ages, although the beneficial effects of age remained even when controlling for these influences. The one exception was worry about one's own health: Once exercise and social connectedness were controlled, increased age was associated with more worry. The results overall suggest that, at least among adults with access to technology, older age was associated with greater resilience during the spring phase of the pandemic. Thus, increased resilience of older adults demonstrated previously extends to the context of the onset of a pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Effects of HD-tDCS on memory and metamemory for general knowledge questions that vary by difficulty.

BACKGROUND: The ability to monitor one's own memory is an important feature of normal memory and is an aspect of 'metamemory'. Lesion studies have shown dissociations between memory and metamemory, but only single dissociations have been shown using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). One potential reason that only single dissociations have been shown is that tDCS effects may be moderated by task difficulty. OBJECTIVE/HYPOTHESIS: We used high definition (HD) tDCS to test for dissociable roles of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and anterior temporal lobe (ATL) in semantic long-term memory and metamemory tasks. We also tested whether general knowledge question difficulty moderated the effects of HD-tDCS. METHODS: Across 3 sessions, participants received active HD-tDCS over the left DLPFC or left ATL, or sham HD-tDCS during general knowledge recall and recognition tests, and a 'feeling-of-knowing' metamemory task. General knowledge questions were blocked by difficulty. Repeated measures ANOVAs were used to examine the effects of HD-tDCS on memory and metamemory tasks by memory question difficulty. RESULTS: HD-tDCS over the ATL led to improved recall compared to DLPFC and sham HD-tDCS, and this occurred only for medium difficulty questions. In contrast, for non-recalled questions, HD-tDCS over the DLPFC led to improved recognition accuracy and improved feeling-of-knowing accuracy compared to ATL and sham HD-tDCS, and this was not moderated by memory question difficulty. CONCLUSION (S): HD-tDCS can be used to dissociate the roles of the ATL and DLPFC in different memory and 'metamemory' tasks. The effects of HD-tDCS on task may be moderated by task difficulty, depending on the nature of the task and site of stimulation.