UMass Amherst research suggests stronger recall may help people recover from sadness.
New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst finds that episodic memory — the ability to recall specific past experiences tied to a time and place — may play an important role in how adults return to a normal emotional state after a strongly negative event. The study indicates this connection between memory and emotion recovery appears stronger for midlife and older adults than for younger adults.
Rebecca Ready, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences, and graduate student Gennarina Santorelli note that prior research had not examined whether episodic memory performance predicts emotional recovery in older adults. Their results, published in Experimental Aging Research, suggest that “stronger memory may facilitate emotion recovery” and that “older adults with memory impairment may be at risk for emotion dysregulation.”
Ready explains that cognitive and emotional processes are closely linked, and that older adults may rely on cognitive resources differently than younger adults when it comes to processing and regulating emotions. “Older adults with stronger scores on cognitive tasks have advantages in regulating their emotions,” she says.
Study participants included 23 younger adults ages 19–23 and 21 midlife and older adults ages 52–79. All participants first completed a brief questionnaire to report their current emotions. They then watched a 12-minute montage made up of four film clips portraying interpersonal loss and loss-related situations. Immediately after the montage and again following a short recovery period, participants reported their momentary emotions.
The montage included clips from the films Up, Steel Magnolias, Sophie’s Choice, and Pay It Forward, each depicting different forms of personal loss and eliciting a range of emotional responses. In this experiment the film sequence reliably increased feelings of sadness and hostility and decreased feelings of joviality — a mood marked by cheerfulness and friendliness.
To assess memory for the film details, researchers presented participants with 15 still images: five were taken from the viewed clips and 10 were from unrelated videos. Participants also answered questions about events and details that occurred in the montage, providing a measure of episodic memory performance focused on visual and content-specific recall.
Ready and Santorelli were especially interested in the pattern of “emotion recovery,” the extent to which participants returned to baseline emotional states after the negative mood induction. They found that participants with better memory for film details showed more complete recovery from the mood induction than participants with lower memory scores.
Importantly, age moderated the link between memory and recovery of positive emotion: among midlife and older adults there was a significantly stronger positive association between better episodic memory and recovery of joviality than among younger adults. In other words, better memory in older participants related to a greater rebound of positive mood after the sad films. The expected moderation by age for recovery of negative emotions such as sadness was not observed, a null finding the authors suggest could stem from the study’s modest sample size or could indicate that recovery of positive emotions is a particularly sensitive measure of effective regulation.
These findings align with other evidence that older adults allocate cognitive resources differently when processing emotional information and regulating affective states. The study raises important questions about whether memory impairments among older adults might contribute to difficulties in emotion regulation and incomplete recovery from negative experiences.
Ready emphasizes the need for further research. Future studies should replicate these results with larger and more diverse samples, examine midlife and older adults separately, and explore whether memory impairment in later life is directly linked to emotion dysregulation. Additional work should also test alternative explanations for the observed association, such as whether feelings of discouragement after a memory test affect subsequent emotion reports.
Source: Janet Lathrop — UMass Amherst
Image Credit: Image is in the public domain.
Original Research: “Emotion Regulation and Memory: Differential Associations in Younger and Midlife/Older Adults” by Rebecca E. Ready and Gennarina D. Santorelli, published in Experimental Aging Research. Published online April 12, 2016. DOI: 10.1080/0361073X.2016.1156971
Abstract
Emotion Regulation and Memory: Differential Associations in Younger and Midlife/Older Adults
Background/Study Context: Older adults may allocate more cognitive resources to processing and regulating emotional stimuli than younger adults. Prior to this study, associations between episodic memory performance and naturalistic emotion recovery across a mixed-age sample were not established. The current research tested whether episodic memory scores relate to emotional recovery after a negative mood induction and whether age moderates these associations.
Methods: Participants viewed a montage of film clips about interpersonal loss. Self-reported negative and positive emotions were collected before the video, immediately after, and again 10 minutes later. Cognitive measures included tests of executive function, processing speed, and episodic memory.
Results: Participants with stronger episodic memory recovered more quickly from the induced negative mood than those with weaker memory. Age moderated the relationship between memory and recovery of joviality: midlife and older adults showed a significantly stronger positive association between memory and restoration of positive mood than younger adults.
Conclusions: Better episodic memory may facilitate emotional recovery, particularly for positive affect, and this effect appears more pronounced in midlife and older adults. These findings suggest that older adults with memory impairment could be at increased risk for difficulties regulating emotions. Further research is needed to replicate and extend these results.