A SYSTEMIC LITERATURE REVIEW OF EMOTION PROCESSING AND

EMOTIONAL MEMORY ENCODING IN YOUNGER AND OLDER ADULTS

Meiselina Irmayanti Abdul U 88077013

Principles and Implication of Mind Sciences, Department of Psychology,

National Cheng-Kung University, Tainan

Introduction

Aging is a reality that is unstoppable, and all creatures in the entire world face it.

Aging is a natural process in late life, and with it declines in cognitive processes and

physical performances (Batty, Starr, Deary, &Whalley, 2006). However, some

cognitive neuroscience researches elucidated that older adults have some abilities

remain relatively stable and some even improve, like emotional competencies may

benefit during old age (Kunzmann &Grühn, 2005; Scheibe &Carstensen, 2010; Yue,

2016). Nevertheless, the issue still has lack of sufficient evidence and empirical

studies.

Beginning with how noteworthy emotion over the lifespan? Emotion is felt by

everyone, but how does that emotional contents affect everyone to experience and

remember of events? (Murray & Kensinger, 2013). Whether young or older adults

with impairments in emotion have greater risk in lifespan because emotion has

prominent role in physiological arousal, cognitive and information processing of

emotions, socio-communicative skill, behavioural flexibility, neural circuitry,

temperament, and mental health (Uhlig, Jaschke, & Scherder, 2013; Weiss et al.,

2014). The previous studies indicated that emotion facilitates encoding of information

efficiently by modulating the selectivity of attention as well as motivating action and

behaviour (Tyng, Amin, Saad, & Malik, 2017; Walsh, 2016). These results still
remain the critical question was how age, and the emotional content of the stimuli,

would influence the ability to process emotion and to encode emotional memory?

Throughout this review, I comprehensively elaborate my investigation regarding

how emotion processing and emotional memory encoding across the adult lifespan

with point on emotion that has substantial influence in “subsequent memory

paradigm” (Blumenfeld & Ranganath, 2007; Kamp, Bader, & Mecklinger, 2017;

Rugg, Otten, & Henson, 2002). Furthermore, this review also highlights three

memory effects of emotion which are effects of arousal, effects of valence, and

valence-specific effects during emotion processing and emotional memory encoding

in younger and older adults.

I conducted a systematic review of emotion processing and emotional memory

encoding in aging with examining the references mostly from chapter 13 that was

wrote by Elizabeth A. Kensinger and Jaclyn H. Ford. Moreover, I established

keywords specifically probing emotion effects in aging to collect more related studies.

The critical findings from this review may give insight and advance clarifies the

previous result of studies regarding older people seem to regulate their emotions

better than younger people. The summary is from various studies with classifications

on vary approaches like task experiments, focus in studies, result on studies, method

in studies, time and hypothesis on studies.

The critical finding from this experiment was that emotion and encoding
strategy had an effect on associative cued recall that differed as a function of age.

Theoretical Assumptions of Emotional Aging and Emotional Memory Encoding

Emotional stimuli and events are vividly and accurately to memorize than neutral

stimuli and events (Talmi, 2013).

Theoretical Assumptions of Arousal Effects

Theoretical Assumptions of Valence Effects

Theoretical Assumptions of Valence-Specific Effects

Theoretical Assumptions of Valence-only Effects

Findings from studies of encoding indicate that, at the cortical level, the regions responsible for the effective
encoding of a stimulus event as an episodic memory include some of the regions that are also engaged to
process the event ‘online’. Thus, it appears that there is no single cortical site or circuit responsible for
episodic encoding. The results of retrieval studies indicate that successful recollection of episodic
information is associated with activation of lateral parietal cortex, along with more variable patterns of
activity in dorsolateral and anterior prefrontal cortex. Whereas parietal regions may play a part in the
representation of retrieved information, prefrontal areas appear to support processes that act on the products
of retrieval to align behaviour with the demands of the retrieval task.

These findings suggest specific task-independent age-related deficits in mentalizing that are

localizable to changes in circumscribed subregions of the default network.

We also summarize the current state of knowledge on the impact of emotion on memory and map
implications
for educational settings.
; this knowledge may be useful for the design of effective
educational curricula to provide a conducive learning environment for both traditional
“live” learning in classrooms and “virtual” learning through online-based educational
technologies.

We also review the nested hierarchies of circular emotional control and cognitive regulation

(bottom-up and top-down influences) within the brain to achieve optimal integration of emotional and

cognitive processing. This review highlights a basic evolutionary approach to emotion to understand

the effects of emotion on learning and memory and the functional roles played by various brain regions

and their mutual interactions in relation to emotional processing. We also summarize the current state

of knowledge on the impact of emotion on memory and map implications for educational settings. In

addition to elucidating the memory-enhancing effects of emotion, neuroimaging findings extend our

understanding of emotional influences on learning and memory processes; this knowledge may be

useful for the design of effective educational curricula to provide a conducive learning environment for

both traditional “live” learning in classrooms and “virtual” learning through online-based educational

technologies.

that is an analysis tool to identify brain activity elicited during episodic encoding
that is associated with successful subsequent retrieval.

Why? Particularly, I systematic delineate with focus on the effects of arousal, the

effects of valence, valence-specific effects which is including valence-only effects.

Why?

You should include:

A. The background and issues of your proposed research

B. Identify your discipline

C. A short literature review

D. A summary of key debates and developments in the field

1. RESEARCH QUESTION(S)/

You should formulate these clearly, giving an explanation as to what problems

and issues are to be explored and why they are worth exploring

2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

You should provide an outline of:

A. the theoretical resources to be drawn on

The aim of the literature study was to investigate the emotional

effects of multisensory stimulation by ambient environmental
features (e.g., lighting, color, sound, scent; Bitner,
1992) and how interventions in the environment can manipulate
emotional responses. Electronic searches were carried
out using the databases ScienceDirect, PubMed, PsycINFO,
and Google Scholar. Search terms used were combinations
of terms from the categories described in Table 1.
Furthermore, related articles were searched based on cited
references in articles found relevant. The taste sense was
excluded as it is difficult to manipulate emotions through
environmental interventions via this modality. The search
was conducted between May 2012 and August 2015.
Included in this review are studies that were performed in the
period between 1974 and 2015 and that

i. deployed interventions involving environmental

stimuli that concurrently stimulate two or more
senses, or multiple cues presented in consecution
(priming);
ii. investigated interaction effects or relative effects of
multisensory cues; and
iii. investigated the effect of sensory cues on at least one
emotional response.

We stress that this study is about multisensory stimulation

and its emotional effects. The study of van Rompay, Tanja-
Dijkstra, Verhoeven, and van Es (2012), for example, that
only manipulated visual (unisensory) stimuli (i.e., color and
layout) was for this reason excluded. Furthermore, an object
itself may not be multimodal, but the appraisal of the object
in its environment can be multimodal, for instance, when
ambient scent and a product visual is manipulated. In that
case, the study fits the inclusion criteria.
Arousal, experienced emotions, feelings, mood, and
affective appraisals were considered emotional responses.
The appraisal of qualitative characteristics of products or
cues such as functionality, sharpness, or loudness was not
considered as an emotional outcome. Furthermore, concerning
the perception and emotion processing level of the framework,
this study focused on experienced emotion (inter perspective) rather than emotion
perception (external perspective).
As a result, as Table 1 shows, “emotion perception”
was not a specific search term. However, emotion
perception articles that were found while searching for studies
on emotional responses were included to provide insights
into this processing level and how it interacts with other levels.
Moderators such as personal traits, social context, and
emotional state were considered in the context of found evidence,
but were not subject of analysis on their own. The
search query resulted in an unknown number of hits (not
documented) of which 166 met our inclusion criteria. Of
these 166, 83 papers were selected based on the abstract,
whereas full text screening finally resulted in 70 relevant
papers.
 3. METHODS

This literature review of 32 studies and 64 measures of ER is the first to

systematically examine the measurement of ER in individuals with ASD.This

review was based on a systematic search of published articles available through

May 2014, and conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for

Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines [Moher, Liberati,

Tetzlaff, & Altman, 2009]. The Medline Ovid and PsycInfo online databases were

searched concurrently for entries using the established keywords from the most

comprehensive ER literature review to date [Adrian et al., 2011] and contained any

combination of the following terms in the Title, Abstract, and Keyword search

fields: (1) “autism” or “Asperger” or “pervasive developmental disorder” and (2)

“emotion regulation” or “emotional regulation” or “emotion management” or

“affect regulation” the research approach (theoretical framework) the research

methods appropriate for the proposed research a discussion of advantages as well

as limits of particular approaches and methods

4. RESULTS

Graph, Model, Design, Tabel

5. DISCUSSION

A. Emotional Aging and Emotional Memory Encoding

Every older adult tested had difficulty successfully generating non-integrative

images, at all encoding speeds, regardless of emotionality, when they had become
extensively practiced at performing integrative imagery prior to the non-integrative

task. Older adults reported imagery success at encoding for more pairs than did

younger adults, there was no main effect of encoding strategy or emotion (all from)

(Murray &Kensinger, 2013).

B. Subsequent memory paradigm

C. Effects of Arousal

D. Effects of Valence

E. Valence-Specific Effects

Valence-only Effects

F. Why older adults have some abilities remain relatively stable and some even

improve, like emotional aging emerges to benefit from age

Younger adults were able to create emotional integrations under time pressure

The critical finding from this experiment was that emotion and encoding
strategy had an effect on associative cued recall that differed as a function of age. Before we
return to the importance of this finding, it is worth noting that emotion did not affect either
item recognition (consistent with prior findings; e.g., Kensinger, Garoff-Eaton, & Schacter,
2007) or the ability to initially form mental images. Thus, emotion and encoding strategy
interacted specifically to influence the likelihood of remembering item associations.
Encoding strategy alone, however, did affect both item recognition and associative cued
recall. As in prior research, integration benefitted associative memory retrieval whereas nonintegration
benefitted item memory retrieval (Graf & Schacter, 1985; 1989).
The fact that emotion did not lead younger or older adults to report less success at creating
an integrated image suggests that the emotional item did not capture younger or older adults’
processing resources to such an extent that they could not carry out the instructed
integration. An effect of emotion did emerge, however, when examining performance on the
cued recall test. To return to the critical finding from this experiment: On the cued recall
test, younger adults demonstrated a numerical retrieval benefit from integration (over nonintegration)
for emotional pairs, but a disproportionately larger advantage was observed for
the integration of two neutral items. Older adults showed the opposite pattern, demonstrating
 a significant associative retrieval benefit from integration (over non-integration) only for

6. CONCLUSION

A. SUMMARY

B. CRITIQUES

C. LIMITATIONS

The fundamental mismatch between the terms used in education scholarship (which tend
to be derived from Pekrun’s 2011 Achievement Emotions Questionnaire) as opposed to
other fields (where terminology most often follows the basic emotion schemes proposed
by Ekman et al. (1969), Panksepp (1994), and similar scholars) has made meta-analysis
in the mathematical sense impractical, since it is difficult to know whether like is being
compared to like when terms do not align. While the following conclusions may potentially
spur experimental research, this paper represents a qualitative critique of existing research
and theory as a method of refining our understanding of theoretical concepts and definitions,
rather than developing yet another novel conceptual scheme.
Study parameters exclude issues connected with emotional intelligence theory, except in
terms of the comparative intellectual history of Pekrun and Stephens (2012) versus competing
models. The core of emotional intelligence theory is emotional regulation, often
accompanied by the idea that no intense emotion is conducive to success in learning or
other endeavors (Mayer and Geher 1996; Goleman 1995; Bar-On 2006). The authors seek
to review the relationship between emotional states and learning, rather than emotional
regulation; therefore emotional intelligence is not germane to this paper. Likewise, not all
seminal works treating the topic of emotion and cognition are included, but only those that
focus on defining the terminology and taxonomy of discrete emotions. Thus, for example,
works of evolutionary psychology such as Greenspan and Shank (2009), Greenspan and
Benderley (1997), and Kandel (2001) have not been included in the review; the literature
proposing causal links between emotion and the development of intelligence is provocative,
but not germane to a discussion of which emotion terms best to use in research into
education and technology. Furthermore, while in time a theory of unified affecto-cognition
which dispenses with the traditional dichotomy of reason and emotion may be valuable for
research, such theory to date lacks instruments that are ready for use in empirical study.
The authors therefore maintain an agnostic view of whether emotion is a discrete mental phenomenon or
rather a subspecies of cognition, as defined for example in Nussbaum
(2001) and Ben-Ze’ev (2000).
Studies about fear, stress, and test anxiety are beyond the scope of this review, and
thus excluded. It is well established in the literature that chronic or toxic anxiety, as
opposed to eustress or beneficial stress, is correlated with poor learning outcomes (see
Zeidner 1998; Eysenck 1997; Seipp 1991; Selye 1976; Sharpe n.d.). Those interested
in learning more about stress, human learning and performance are encouraged to read
Zeidner, Eysenck and Selye.
Finally, a limitation of the literature that creates a corresponding limitation of this
review is the lack of a major longitudinal study related to emotion and learning. Were
this to be conducted, the results would constitute a contribution to knowledge that would
repay the difficulty and expense of this methodology.
The authors have mainly followed Cooper’s (1985) method for literature reviews,
but dissent on one point: her tenet that excessive questioning of definitions should be
avoided. In this case, the definitions proved to be one of the most fertile areas for metatheory.
Scholars without a common understanding of key terms may talk past each
other—which appears to be one root cause of the problem. The review thus begins with
an examination of three common approaches to explaining and predicting human emotions.
The authors then note experimental, psychographic, and conceptual concerns with
academic emotion theory and critically review the state of both neuropsychological and
educational research on human emotions.

There are three main limitations of this study, which suggest avenues for future research.
First, we did not directly measure the time it took participants to form each mental image,
and therefore we do not know the effect of age or emotion on the minimum amount of time
required to form successful integrative images. Second, we do not know whether it is
generally the amount of encoding time that matters for integrative imagery success, or
whether there is a specific process (e.g., elaboration of mental images) that was affected by
the encoding time manipulation. Future research could ask participants to provide more
detailed descriptions of their mental images as a way to elucidate the differences between
images created under time pressure and those created with extended time. Future research
designs could also use divided attention manipulations, provide emotion regulation
instructions, or guide participants toward specific integration strategies to hone in on the
reasons for the age differences revealed here. Third, because we used an extreme age group
design, we could not identify when across the adult lifespan these age differences emerge.
Despite these limitations, the present study provides the first evidence that emotion has
different effects on integrative success in young and older adults. The results further reveal
that the effects of emotion on integrative success differ depending on whether integrative success is
defined as the ability to generate an integrative representation at encoding or as
the ability to retrieve the associated representation from memory. These results emphasize
that factors, such as emotion, that facilitate the initial creation of a representation do not
necessarily facilitate the retention of that representation in memory.

D. IMPLICATIONS

In summary, a consistent pattern emerges concerning emotion constructs in educational research:

questions framed in terms of emotions that are recognized by basic emotion theory tend to yield sound
results with low p-values, while questions framed in terms recognized only by academic emotion theory,
even within the same study (since the academicemotions include the basic emotions) consistently show
marked drops in p-value for thoseemotions, often to a point that most social science disciplines would
consider non-significant.
In addition, the negative basic emotions other than fear remain understudied. While to some extent the lack
of physiological measures in educational research can be attributed to lack of funding (the projects reviewed
had partnerships ensuring more resources than is typical in education, such as Isen’s frequent collaborations
with management scientists), money does not appear to be the only factor restricting use of such methods.
The challenges faced in modeling correlates to academic emotions in video game design studies (Mandryk et
al. 2006) suggest that a problem with underlying theory is at work. The CHI 2006 conference at which
Mandryk et al. presented their findings was sponsored by Google, Intel, Yahoo!, IBM, eBay, Cisco, and the
NSF, among others, and in general the sector of video game studies, connected as it is with a highly
profitable entertainment model, can be expected to attract large amounts of funding from corporate partners.
Since there are similar results in recreational gaming studies that use concepts similar to those distinct to
academic emotions, it may be inferred that money is not the only reason why educational research on
emotions is out of step with other disciplines. While objections have been raised that physiological
instruments such as EEG are too invasive to constitute a realistic learning condition, the results of using
EEG and similar instruments on gamers do not suggest that these devices interfere with the pleasure of
gaming (Kivikangas et al. 2011); therefore, such methods show great promise for future research on human
learning—but only if used in conjunction with a theory of emotion simple enough that the results are
consistent and make sense. Within the simple and researchtested basic emotion paradigm, the greatest
shortages of literature are on the effects of negative emotions other than fear, such as anger and disgust.
For these reasons, it may be hypothesized both that physiological studies of emotions in learning will
generate more powerful results if a basic rather than academic emotions concept is used to guide study
design, and that there is a need for studies of the effects of anger, disgust and other negative emotions other
than fear, given the frequency of these emotions in everyday experience.
7. Bibliography