Emotional memory in older adults: Negative stimuli recall test

Abstract

Emotional memory is the result of storage the information that was accompanied by very stressful or arousal factors through which may be fixed more easily. Several investigations indicated that emotional events are better remembered than neutral ones. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of age on the assessment of emotional stimuli and emotional memory in elderly people, comparing their performance with that of young adults. To achieve this goal the participants watched 48 images with negative emotional or neutral content and immediately after that they performed a recall test. This study found that the retention of the information with emotional and neutral content is significantly lower in older adults. Nevertheless, in both groups the emotional assessment of the images was preserved.

Keywords

• emotional memory
• aging
• elderly
• negative emotional stimuli
• recall test
• memory
• empirical article.