Individual Differences in Older Adult Frontal Lobe Function Relate to Memory and Neural Activity for Self-Relevant and Emotional Content.

OBJECTIVES: Older adults show memory benefits for self-relevant and emotional content, but there are individual differences in this effect. It has been debated whether processing of self-relevant and emotional information relies on similar processes to one another. We examined whether variation in frontal lobe (FL) function among older adults related similarly to the processing of self-relevant information as it did to emotional information, or whether these relations diverged. METHODS: While undergoing fMRI, participants (ages 60-88) viewed positive, negative, and neutral objects, and imagined placing those objects in either their home or a stranger's home. Participants completed a surprise memory test outside of the MRI. In a separate session, a cognitive battery was collected and composite scores measuring FL and medial temporal lobe function were computed and related to the behavioral memory performance and the neural engagement during fMRI. RESULTS: Behaviorally, FL function related to memory for self-relevant, but not emotional content. Older adults with higher FL function demonstrated reduced self-bias in memory performance. During the processing of self-relevant stimuli, independent of emotion, levels of activity in the middle frontal gyrus showed positive associations with FL function. This relationship was not driven by compensatory activity or disruptions to nonself-relevant neutral content. DISCUSSION: These findings point to divergence in the cognitive functions relating to memory enhancements for self- and emotional-relevance. The results further suggest self-relevance as a mnemonic device for older adults, especially in those with lower FL function.

Empathy, memory, and aging during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recently, there has been increasing attention to the interaction between empathy and memory. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period when empathy played a key role in people's behaviors, we assessed the relationship between empathy and memory. In this pre-registered report, we used memory accuracy for the number of COVID-19 cases as a measure of recent memory and examined its relationship with trait empathy. Moreover, we investigated whether cognitive vs. affective empathy differently associate with one's memory for the number of COVID-19 cases, given evidence for distinct mechanisms for the two aspects of empathy. Finally, we assessed how age is related to empathy-memory associations. To address these questions, we used the Boston College COVID-19 Dataset, which included surveys assessing dispositional empathy and memory for the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases during the first wave of the pandemic. Empathy was not associated with memory accuracy for the confirmed cases when using an empathy measure that combined both cognitive and affective empathy. However, when using a measure that separately assessed cognitive and affective empathy, only affective empathy, specifically the personal distress subscale, was associated with greater memory accuracy. There was no age-related difference in memory accuracy despite age-related decreases in affective empathy. Results suggest that individuals with greater affective empathy (i.e., greater tendency to feel discomfort by the suffering of others) can have more accurate memory for details of an ongoing empathy-evoking situation. Findings are discussed in the context of motivation and emotional arousal. The current study provides ecological evidence to corroborate the interplay of empathy and memory.

Cognitive decline, socioemotional change, or both? How the science of aging can inform future research on sacrificial moral dilemmas.

Older adults comprise the fastest-growing population in the United States. By exercising their right to vote, guiding the value systems of future generations, and holding political office, they shape the moral context of society. It is therefore imperative that we understand older adults' capacity for moral decision-making. Although the vast majority of research on moral decision-making has either focused specifically on younger adults or has not considered age, recent work points to age-related differences in sacrificial moral decision-making, with cognitively healthy older adults making more deontological decisions relative to younger adults. Although only a small number of studies have to date examined age-related differences, there is a wealth of relevant literature on cognitive aging, as well as on sacrificial moral decision-making in younger adults, that point to possible mechanistic explanations for the observed age-related differences. The goal of this review is to situate these age-related differences in sacrificial moral decision-making in the context of these existing literatures in order to guide future, theory-informed, research in this area. We specifically highlight age-related decline in cognitive abilities purported to support utilitarian moral decision-making in younger adults, along with age-related changes to socioemotional information processing as potential mechanistic explanations for these age-related differences. The last section of this review discusses how age-related neural changes may contribute to both cognitive decline and motivational shifts, highlighting the importance for future research to understand brain-behavior relationships on the topic of sacrificial moral decision-making and aging.

Age-related differences in Default Mode Network resting-state functional connectivity but not gray matter volume relate to sacrificial moral decision-making and working memory performance.

Older adults make fewer utilitarian decisions than younger adults during sacrificial moral dilemmas, which are associated with age-related reductions in Default Mode Network resting-state functional connectivity. Decreases on tasks associated with fluid cognitive abilities, such as working memory capacity, are also associated with age-related Default Mode Network changes. Regions within this network demonstrate some of the greatest age-related gray matter atrophy. Age-related changes in structure and function of the Default Mode Network may be associated with poorer working memory capacity and reduced utilitarian moral decision-making. Alternatively, recent theories suggest that age-related changes to Default Mode Network function may be adaptive in the context of tasks that include socioemotional components. As such, reduced within-network resting-state functional connectivity of the Default Mode Network may be associated with differential outcomes in moral decision-making for younger and older adults. In the present study, there were no age-related differences in working memory capacity. Older adults were less likely than younger adults to indicate the utilitarian option when trials involved Instrumental harm. Generally, increased within-network resting-state functional connectivity of the Default Mode Network was associated with better working memory performance in both groups, and reduced bias to endorse the utilitarian option during Incidental dilemmas compared to Instrumental dilemmas in younger adults. Older adults with similar moral decision-making behavior to younger adults demonstrated increased coupling between Default Mode Network and Salience Network regions. These findings suggest that Default Mode Network functional integrity may be differentially associated with age-related changes to working memory capacity and sacrificial moral decision-making.

Moral decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic: Associations with age, negative affect, and negative memory.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided the opportunity to determine whether age-related differences in utilitarian moral decision-making during sacrificial moral dilemmas extend to non-sacrificial dilemmas in real-world settings. As affect and emotional memory are associated with moral and prosocial behaviors, we also sought to understand how these were associated with moral behaviors during the 2020 spring phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Older age, higher negative affect, and greater reports of reflecting on negative aspects of the pandemic were associated with higher reported purchase of hard-to-find goods, while older age and higher negative affect alone were associated with higher reported purchase of hard-to-find medical supplies. Older age was associated with what appeared at first to be non-utilitarian moral behaviors with regard to the purchasing of these supplies; However, they also reported distributing these goods to family members rather than engaging in hoarding behaviors. These findings suggest that advancing age may be associated with engagement in utilitarian moral decision-making in real-world settings more than the sacrificial moral decision-making literature would suggest.

Distinct stress-related changes in intrinsic amygdala connectivity predict subsequent positive and negative memory performance.

Experiencing stress before an event can influence how that event is later remembered. In the current study, we examine how individual differences in one's physiological response to a stressor are related to changes to underlying brain states and memory performance. Specifically, we examined how changes in intrinsic amygdala connectivity relate to positive and negative memory performance as a function of stress response, defined as a change in cortisol. Twenty-five participants underwent a social stressor before an incidental emotional memory encoding task. Cortisol samples were obtained before and after the stressor to measure individual differences in stress response. Three resting state scans (pre-stressor, post-stressor/pre-encoding and post-encoding) were conducted to evaluate pre- to post-stressor and pre- to post-encoding changes to intrinsic amygdala connectivity. Analyses examined relations between greater cortisol changes and connectivity changes. Greater cortisol increases were associated with a greater decrease in prefrontal-amygdala connectivity following the stressor and a reversal in the relation between prefrontal-amygdala connectivity and negative vs. positive memory performance. Greater cortisol increases were also associated with a greater increase in amygdala connectivity with a number of posterior sensory regions following encoding. Consistent with prior findings in non-stressed individuals, pre- to post-encoding increases in amygdala-posterior connectivity were associated with greater negative relative to positive memory performance, although this was specific to lateral rather than medial posterior regions and to participants with the greatest cortisol changes. These findings suggest that stress response is associated with changes in intrinsic connectivity that have downstream effects on the valence of remembered emotional content.

Cue-utilization in the imagination inflation effect paradigm in older adults with mild cognitive impairment.

OBJECTIVE: We investigated the imagination inflation effect in healthy older adults and older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to determine whether an intervention can reduce susceptibility to these distortions, with implications for daily functioning. METHOD: Fifty-seven older adults aged 69-90 participated. In Session 1, participants either: listened to an action statement being read, performed the action, or imagined performing the action. Actions were either functional (encountered actions of daily life; e.g., "fill the pillbox") or nonfunctional (not routinely encountered; e.g., "put the toy duck on a plate"). During Session 2, participants imagined action statements from the first session. In Session 3, participants were asked to determine whether action statements were performed during the first session. Intervention participants were instructed before the first and third sessions to attend various sensory aspects of their experience using a cue-utilization technique. RESULTS: Memory was worse for functional compared to nonfunctional actions. For older adults with MCI, the intervention increased correct identifications of functional actions that were performed. For healthy older adults, the intervention increased source memory of functional actions that were imagined. The intervention did not impact the accuracy of nonfunctional actions or the rates of misremembering an action as having been performed. CONCLUSIONS: These initial findings supported the efficacy of a cue-utilization intervention to improve memory for functional actions in an imagination inflation effect paradigm in community-dwelling older adults. The use of such strategies represents an important first step in designing interventions that are applicable to daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Aging, Empathy, and Prosocial Behaviors During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

OBJECTIVES: Previous literature suggests age-related increases in prosociality. Does such an age-prosociality relationship occur during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, or might the pandemic-as a stressor that may differently influence young and older adults-create a boundary condition on the relationship? If so, can empathy, a well-known prosocial disposition, explain the age-prosociality relationship? This study investigated these questions and whether the target (distant others compared to close others) of prosocial behaviors differs by age. METHODS: Participants completed a series of surveys on dispositional empathy and prosocial behaviors for a study assessing their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were 330 participants (aged 18-89) from the United States who completed all of the surveys included in the present analyses. RESULTS: Age was positively related to greater prosociality during the pandemic. Although empathy was positively associated with individuals' prosociality, it did not account for the age-prosociality association. Interestingly, increasing age was associated with greater prosocial behaviors toward close others (i.e., family, friends). DISCUSSION: Results are discussed in the context of socioemotional goals and substantiate that findings of age differences in prosocial behaviors occur during the period of limited resources and threat associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Slow oscillation-spindle coupling is negatively associated with emotional memory formation following stress.

Both stress and sleep enhance emotional memory. They also interact, with the largest effect of sleep on emotional memory being seen when stress occurs shortly before or after encoding. Slow wave sleep (SWS) is critical for long-term episodic memory, facilitated by the temporal coupling of slow oscillations and sleep spindles. Prior work in humans has shown these associations for neutral information in non-stressed participants. Whether coupling interacts with stress to facilitate emotional memory formation is unknown. Here, we addressed this question by reanalyzing an existing dataset of 64 individuals. Participants underwent a psychosocial stressor (32) or comparable control (32) prior to the encoding of 150-line drawings of neutral, positive, and negative images. All participants slept overnight with polysomnography, before being given a surprise memory test the following day. In the stress group, time spent in SWS was positively correlated with memory for images of all valences. Results were driven by those who showed a high cortisol response to the stressor, compared to low responders. The amount of slow oscillation-spindle coupling during SWS was negatively associated with neutral and emotional memory in the stress group only. The association with emotional memory was significantly stronger than for neutral memory within the stress group. These results suggest that stress around the time of initial memory formation impacts the relationship between slow wave sleep and memory.

An ERP investigation of age differences in the negativity bias for self-relevant and non-self-relevant stimuli.

As we age, we show increased attention and memory for positive versus negative information, and a key event-related potential (ERP) marker of emotion processing, the late positive potential (LPP), is sensitive to these changes. In young adults the emotion effect on the LPP is also quite sensitive to the self-relevance of stimuli. Here we investigated whether the shift toward positive stimuli with age would be magnified by self-relevance. Participants read 2-sentence scenarios that were either self-relevant or non-self-relevant with a neutral, positive, or negative critical word in the second sentence. The LPP was largest for self-relevant negative information in young adults, with no significant effects of emotion for non-self-relevant scenarios. In contrast, older adults showed a smaller negativity bias, and the effect of emotion was not modulated by self-relevance. The 3-way interaction of age, emotion, and self-relevance suggests that the presence of self-relevant stimuli may reduce or inhibit effects of emotion for non-self-relevant stimuli on the LPP in young adults, but that older adults do not show this effect to the same extent.

Neural mechanisms supporting emotional and self-referential information processing and encoding in older and younger adults.

Emotion and self-referential information can both enhance memory, but whether they do so via common mechanisms across the adult lifespan remains underexplored. To address this gap, the current study directly compared, within the same fMRI paradigm, the encoding of emotionally salient and self-referential information in older adults and younger adults. Behavioral results replicated the typical patterns of better memory for emotional than neutral information and for self-referential than non-self-referential materials; these memory enhancements were present for younger and older adults. In neural activity, young and older adults showed similar modulation by emotion, but there were substantial age differences in the way self-referential processing affected neural recruitment. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found little evidence for overlap in the neural mechanisms engaged for emotional and self-referential processing. These results reveal that-just as in cognitive domains-older adults can show similar performance to younger adults in socioemotional domains even though the two age groups engage distinct neural mechanisms. These findings demonstrate the need for future research delving into the neural mechanisms supporting older adults' memory benefits for socioemotional material.

Interactive effects of stress reactivity and rapid eye movement sleep theta activity on emotional memory formation.

Sleep and stress independently enhance emotional memory consolidation. In particular, theta oscillations (4-7 Hz) during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep increase coherence in an emotional memory network (i.e., hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex) and enhance emotional memory. However, little is known about how stress during learning might interact with subsequent REM theta activity to affect emotional memory. In the current study, we examined whether the relationship between REM theta activity and emotional memory differs as a function of pre-encoding stress exposure and reactivity. Participants underwent a psychosocial stressor (the Trier Social Stress Task; n = 32) or a comparable control task (n = 32) prior to encoding. Task-evoked cortisol reactivity was assessed by salivary cortisol rise from pre- to post-stressor, and participants in the stress condition were additionally categorized as high or low cortisol responders via a median split. During incidental encoding, participants studied 150 line drawings of negative, neutral, and positive images, followed by the complete color photo. All participants then slept overnight in the lab with polysomnographic recording. The next day, they were given a surprise recognition memory task. Results showed that memory was better for emotional relative to neutral information. Critically, these findings were observed only in the stress condition. No emotional memory benefit was observed in the control condition. In stressed participants, REM theta power significantly predicted memory for emotional information, specifically for positive items. This relationship was observed only in high cortisol responders. For low responders and controls, there was no relationship between REM theta and memory of any valence. These findings provide evidence that elevated stress at encoding, and accompanying changes in neuromodulators such as cortisol, may interact with theta activity during REM sleep to promote selective consolidation of emotional information.

Spared emotional perception in patients with Alzheimer's disease is associated with negative caregiver outcomes.

OBJECTIVES: Caregivers (CGs) for patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) often experience negative mental health and relationship outcomes. Additionally, emotional perception abilities are often compromised in early AD; the relationships between these deficits and CG outcomes are unclear. The present study investigated the relationship between emotional perception abilities in AD participants and CG well-being. METHODS: Participants included 28 individuals with AD, their spousal CGs, and 30 older controls (OCs). Patients and controls completed the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and Advanced Clinical Solutions: Social Perception subtest. CGs completed questionnaires related to relationship satisfaction, burden, depression, and patient neuropsychiatric symptoms and activities of daily living. RESULTS: The patient group performed significantly worse than OCs on measures of cognition and emotional perception. Several significant relationships emerged between AD participant emotional perception and CG outcomes. Higher CG depression was associated with greater overall emotional perception abilities (r = .39, p = .041). Caregiver burden was positively correlated with AD participants' ability to label the emotional tones of voices (r = .47, p = .015). Relationship satisfaction was not significantly correlated with emotional perception. DISCUSSION: This study replicated earlier findings of impaired emotional perception abilities in AD participants. However, preserved abilities in emotional perception were associated greater CG depression and burden. Interestingly, the CGs satisfaction with the marital relationship did not appear to be influenced by changes in emotional perception. Higher emotional engagement among couples in which one spouse has cognitive impairment may contribute to increased negative interactions and in turn a greater sense of burden and depression, while leaving the marital relationship preserved.

'In this together' or 'Going it alone': Spousal dyad approaches to Alzheimer's.

Spouses provide the majority of care for individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD). The qualitative literature suggests that couples adopt one of two perspectives in their accounts of AD: a We/Us approach where couples describe experiences as a composite whole or an I/Me approach where couples describe themselves as experiencing the impact of AD separately. Little is known about how these perspectives relate to the individual characteristics of either affected party. This study investigated the experiences of dyads taking both approaches. Eleven spousal dyads were divided into I/Me (n=5) and We/Us (n=6) groupings based on qualitative analyses completed as part of a larger project. Diagnosed individuals were given measures of cognitive and functional ability and caregivers completed anxiety, depression, burden, relationship satisfaction, and positive aspects of caregiving measures. We found no significant differences between groups on patient cognitive or functional ability, or caregiver anxiety, depression, burden, or relationship satisfaction. However, We/Us caregivers expressed more positive aspects of caregiving than I/Me caregivers. These findings suggest the I/Me approach is not associated with differences in variables of patient cognitive status or functional ability or caregiver emotional health, perceived burden, or relationship satisfaction. Caregivers taking a We/Us approach, however, were able to identify more positive aspects of caregiving. This may be related to mutual compassion, a characteristic of the We/Us approach, which may be protective.