2006 AFAR Research Grant: How Aging Affects Memory for Emotional Events: Behavioral and Neuroimaging Investigations

Please give a brief summary of your AFAR research project.
This project will investigate the cognitive (thought-level) and neural (brain-level) processes that young and older adults use to help them remember information that has emotional significance to them (i.e., information that is perceived as being pleasant or unpleasant).

What problems are you addressing and what specific questions will your research seek to answer?
The vast majority of research focused on understanding age-related changes in memory has examined memory for information that contains no personal significance or emotional importance. But of course, in our daily lives, many of the experiences that we remember are those that evoked an emotional reaction. It currently is an open question whether the effects of emotion on memory are stable across the adult lifespan. Although some research has suggested that older adults may show memory boosts for emotional information, other research has suggested that older adults may tend to focus on positive information while forgetting negative information.

The proposed research will examine the extent to which the characteristics of the to-be-remembered information (e.g., whether they are positive or negative) and the memory demands required by the task (e.g., whether it is sufficient to remember that a picture of a snake was shown, or whether a participant also must remember the exact color of the snake or the location on the screen) influence whether older adults show memory enhancement for emotional information. Through the use of functional neuroimaging (fMRI), this research also will be able to examine the neural processes that young and older adults use to successfully learn and retrieve emotional information, and to investigate whether the processes that are recruited by older adults are the same as, or distinct from, those processes engaged by young adults.

What aspects of your project are most interesting from a scientific point of view?
There are currently no published studies comparing the neural processes that young and older adults use when successfully (or unsuccessfully) learning and retrieving emotional information. Thus, the proposed studies will be an essential first step in understanding the extent to which advancing age affects memory for emotional information, and the brain changes that may underlie any age-related changes in emotional memory.

What are the implications of your research for age-related diseases and disorders?
I have shown in previous research (e.g., Kensinger et al., 2002, Emotion; Kensinger et al., 2004, Neuropsychologia) that patients with mild Alzheimer's disease do not receive the same memory benefit from emotional information as do healthy individuals. By understanding which aspects of emotional memory are impacted by healthy aging as compared to age-related disease, this research may provide ways to distinguish healthy from pathological aging at a relatively early stage.

Return to 2006 AFAR Grantees