Psychology and Aging 2005, Vol. 20, No.

4, 539 541

Copyright 2005 by the American Psychological Association 0882-7974/05/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0882-7974.20.4.539

Introduction to the Special Section on EmotionCognition Interactions and the Aging Mind
Fredda Blanchard-Fields
Georgia Institute of Technology

This editorial previews the articles that appear in the special section on emotion cognition interactions and the aging mind. These articles examine in older adults the degree to which intact emotional processing affects, and perhaps enhances, what has more traditionally been considered purely cognitive processing. Thus, they help advance researchers understanding of the complex interplay between emotion and cognition and raise important questions for future research in this area. Decades of research have yielded an abundance of empirical studies demonstrating that older adults show decline in comparison to young adults across a wide variety of cognitive tasks (for review, see Zacks, Hasher, & Li, 2000). These declines occur in a number of areas of cognitive functioning, such as sensory functioning, working memory, attention, and executive abilities that tax deliberative, effortful information processing (Park, 2002; Zacks et al., 2000). Of course, not all types of memory are affected equally. For example, systems that require less deliberative processing, such as semantic memory, do not necessarily decline with age. Of particular interest to this special section is that, along with the research on cognitive decline, there are a growing number of studies that demonstrate that emotional experience and emotion regulation remain intact and may even improve across adulthood (Blanchard-Fields, 1998; Charles, Mather, & Carstensen, 2003; Rahhal, May, & Hasher, 2002). Given the different developmental trajectories of the emotion system and cognitive systems that require deliberative processing, there has been a recent surge of interest in investigating their interactions in the aging mind (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005; Mather, 2004). Accordingly, evidence is mounting that suggests that emotional variables improve performance on cognitive tasks (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005). At the same time, it is important to note that there are also inconsistencies in the literature. On the one hand, there are quite a few memory studies that have found that older adults remember proportionally more positive relative to negative information more so than do young adults, despite the fact that the absolute amount of information retained is lower in older adults (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005; Charles et al., 2003; Mather & Carstensen, 2003). This phenomenon is typically referred to as a positivity effect. On the other hand, there are studies that demonstrate a memory enhancement for negative information in older adults (Kensinger, Brierley, Medford, Growdon, & Corkin, 2002; Denburg, Buchanan, Tranel, & Adolphs, 2003). There are two major issues that arise from these
Fredda Blanchard-Fields, School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Fredda Blanchard-Fields, School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Psychology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0170. E-mail: fb12@prism.gatech.edu 539

findings and that are the focus of this special section. First, what are the conditions that determine when a positivity effect can be observed in older adults? In other words, what are the systematic differences in studies where these effects are found and where they are not found? Second, given the evidence for a positivity effect in older adults, what are the mechanisms that account for this preferential treatment of positive information over negative information? Is this relative preference compensatory in nature? In other words, do intact emotional processes ameliorate cognitive decline? For example, what is the role of emotion regulation in processing information? Or do these interactions represent a constellation of spared processes? That is, do the mechanisms responsible for these emotional performance advantages operate independently of cognitive functioning? The articles proposed for this special section present varied research projects that examine how emotional factors influence cognitive performance in long-term memory, working memory, source memory, and social judgments. The goal of this compilation of work is to begin to provide some answers to the above questions, while underscoring a recent surge in emotion cognition and aging investigations. The first two articles provide evidence for a positivity effect in older adults emotional memory. The first article focuses on working memory for affective versus visual information, and the second article examines the role of executive processes in an observed positivity effect in older adults memory for pictures. Mikels, Larkin, Reuter-Lorenz, and Carstensen (2005) extend research on the positivity effect in older adults to working memory. First, they found evidence of a cognitive process that appears to remain intact in older adults. Working memory involving judging the intensity of affective pictorial information showed no age differences, in contrast to working memory tasks involving intensity judgments of visual information, which did demonstrate the typical age differences (i.e., young adults performed better than did older adults). Second, a positivity effect in older adults was found. In the affective working memory task, older adults performed better on positive relative to negative emotion trials, whereas young adults displayed the opposite pattern. The contributions of this article are twofold. First, the authors have developed an elegant new task to tap cognitive processing of emotional material. Second, they demonstrate not only the positivity effect in older adults but also a corresponding negativity effect in young adults. Although not directly examined, their findings are suggestive of the fact that executive processes associated with emotion-related working memory may be unimpaired with age. In addition, it may be the case that older adults superior ability to regulate emotions influences their success at this task. This is also taken up in the Mather

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and Knight (2005) article. What remains to be seen is whether this age difference involves differential allocation of limited resources to emotionally gratifying or positive information (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005), perhaps at the cost of other forms of functioning or a spared cognitive process in itself. Mather and Knight (2005) also demonstrate a positivity effect in older adults and a negativity effect in young adults in pictorial emotion memory. In addition to demonstrating this effect, they also focus on the role executive control processes play in the positivity effect. In fact, they find that age-related differences in emotion memory are associated with higher levels of cognitive control. As in the Mikels et al. (2005) study, they also speculate that although there may be a motivational preference for encoding positive information on the part of older adults, such processing goals are necessary but not sufficient to produce the positivity effect. Only those older adults with higher levels of cognitive control exhibited this effect. In addition, when cognitive control was reduced in older adults, the positivity effect was attenuated. These two studies demonstrate nicely that it is not emotion-related goals or cognitive decline alone that can account for these findings. Instead, it is an interaction between the two systems. In particular, Mather and Knight find that cognitive capacity in the form of control processes is needed to implement ones processing goals. Again, similar to Mikels et al., Mather and Knight further suggest that such cognitive control processes are necessary for emotion regulation and can easily deplete resources. This becomes relevant when discussing the Mienaltowski and Blanchard-Fields (2005) article. First, the next two articles are previewed in that they were less successful in demonstrating the positivity effect. Thus, they provide important information as to the conditions under which the positivity effect is observed. The article by May, Rahhal, Berry, and Leighton (2005) examines the differential preferences for emotional information in older adults on source memory. They focused primarily on the degree to which older adults spontaneously focus on meaningful, emotionally laden dimensions when encoding information. They effectively teased apart whether older adults focus on the emotional or conceptual nature of the information presented. Indeed, they found a memorial advantage for emotion-related source memory relative to neutral information. It is interesting that, as in the Mikels et al. (2005) study, older adults ability to process and retain contextual information that was emotionally laden remained intact, whereas older adults ability to retain contextual information that was strictly perceptual or conceptual information that was neutral in valence was worse than that of young adults. However, it is not clear whether the advantage was based on older adults tendency to focus on negative, positive, or both types of information. Thus far, their conclusion was that the emotional nature of the stimuli, in general, influenced source memory in older adults. An important implication of May et al.s findings is that the memorial advantage of processing emotion-laden information may be driving increased elaborative processing of the emotion-laden material. Thus, again examining the interaction between emotion and cognition is an optimal method toward understanding older adults cognitive processing. It raises the following important question: Does this motivational tendency to engage emotion-related information evoke more elaborative processing, leading to better recall? With a novel approach to examining emotion cognition interactions in memory, Gru hn, Smith, and Baltes (2005) examined the

positivity effect for lists of words that were either homogeneous in valence (e.g., all negative or all positive) or heterogeneous in valence (e.g., including positive, negative, and neutral words). The authors argue that heterogeneous, but not homogeneous, lists evoke selective processing on the part of older adults, (i.e., they provide strong cues to select words for processing based on valence). Thus, if a positivity effect exists, it should be observed under these conditions. However, their findings offer no evidence of a positivity effect in older adults under either condition. Instead, they found that both older and young adults recalled more negative than positive words. In addition, this emotion-based prioritization (negativity effect) was greater for young adults than for older adults. This finding, of course, coincides nicely with a large literature on young adults indicating that, compared with other stimuli, negative information attracts more processing resources. The contrasting age differences found in this study, as compared with the Mikels et al. (2005) study and the Mather and Knight (2005) study, yield important information regarding researchers understanding of emotion cognition interactions. First, why is it that the negativity effect for older adults was attenuated? Similar to all of the authors in this special section, these authors argue that if older adults indeed display intact emotion regulation abilities, it may be the case that they down-regulate negative affect, and this may reduce the ability to make effective comparisons between negative and positive stimuli. The interesting question raised is whether the positivity effect is actually a reduced negativity effect on the part of older adults. In addition, an important question to ask is whether older adults actively divert attention away from negative information or whether they just are not able to process this information as well as young adults. These questions, again, apply to all of the studies thus far and warrant future research. In all of the articles previewed thus far, reference has been made to a possible mechanism for the positivity effect, the resource demands encountered when engaging in emotion regulation. The final article by Mienaltowski and Blanchard-Fields (2005) in this special section directly examines emotion induction and its effect on social judgments. They examined the age-related differential influence of induced positive and negative emotion on the ability to objectively make social judgments. Contrary to research suggesting that negative mood induction evokes more elaborative processing, resulting (in this case) in a reduced judgment bias, a reduced judgment bias was more prominent for older adults in the positive mood condition. In other words, they were, for example, appropriately less confident in a tenuous judgment when their mood was positive than when it was negative. The authors argue that it may be the case, as with the above studies, that older adults were engaging in emotion repair in the negative mood condition. Given that emotion regulation is resource depleting, they may not have processed the details necessary to make a more appropriate social judgment. Again, the possibility that older adults spontaneously engage in the emotion regulation of negative mood or information may be an important factor influencing their cognitive processing. In this case, its influence is disadvantageous to making appropriate social judgments. The articles in this special section begin to answer the questions put forth in this introduction. They offer two conditions under which a positivity effect in older adulthood is observed. First, it appears to depend on the older adults cognitive capacity level, in this case, executive cognitive control. Second, it appears to depend

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on the nature of the task, such as whether information is presented in a comparative framework (i.e., heterogeneous lists) or not (i.e., homogeneous lists). In addition, what is not addressed in the above studies is that the nature of the stimuli under investigation also differed (e.g., pictures vs. words). This also could affect when the positivity effect is observed. With respect to mechanisms, conceptually relevant, emotion-laden information, in general, may serve as a trigger for more elaborative processing on the part of older adults. Finally, age-related differences in emotion regulation may also play an important role in determining when a positivity effect will be observed. Although none of the studies directly assessed how emotion regulation may produce a positivity effect, they will serve as catalysts for future research to examine this possibility. This set of articles highlights the importance of the recent increase in attention to emotion cognition interactions in the aging mind. They raise important new critical questions to be posed about cognitive aging when taking into consideration the functioning emotional system. In addition, they also offer novel and valuable frameworks for providing empirical answers to those questions.

References
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