A positivity effect in autobiographical memory, but not phonemic fluency, in older adults

@article{Tomaszczyk2012APE,
  title={A positivity effect in autobiographical memory, but not phonemic fluency, in older adults},
  author={Jennifer Christina Tomaszczyk and Myra A. Fernandes},
  journal={Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition},
  year={2012},
  volume={19},
  pages={699 - 722}
}
ABSTRACT To investigate whether processing fluency or cognitive control processes underlie aging-related positivity effects in memory, we compared retrieval of words on a fluency task, and of events on an autobiographical task, in younger and older adults. No positivity effect in word output was found on the fluency task, though older adults output more neutral words. For our autobiographical task, participants wrote descriptions of personal events related to cue words (3 each of positive… 
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Methods Citations
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15 Citations

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Investigation of different properties of autobiographical remembering as a function of discrete emotions and age demonstrated that older adults' angry memories received lower ratings on some phenomenological properties than other emotional memories whereas younger adults's angry memories did not show this same pattern.
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Results may suggest that the positivity effect in older adults' autobiographical memories is potentially due to age-related changes in controlled emotional processing implemented by the VMPFC/ACC-amygdala circuit.
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Age-related differences in attentional bias for emotional faces
  • J. Tomaszczyk, M. Fernandes
  • Psychology, Medicine
    Neuropsychology, development, and cognition. Section B, Aging, neuropsychology and cognition
  • 2014
TLDR
Results suggest younger adults have a negativity bias in attention orienting regardless of the valence of nearby stimuli, whereas older adults show an absence of this bias when positive information is present.
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Adult development is not characterised by straightforward shifts in preferences for use of different ER strategies, and Moderator variables appear to be of central importance in shaping the emergence of age differences in ER.
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Overall differences in EF with age are found, such that variability in age effects emerged at the task level, and updating was not as affected by age as other subdomains.
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