Semantic relatedness and distinctive processing may inflate older adults' positive memory bias

Disentangling Aging and Mood Effects on Emotional Memory

Older adults tend to be in a more positive mood than young adults, and tend to remember positive information more often than negative information, yet the link between their positive mood and their positive memory bias has not often been explored. In this study, we manipulated young and older adults’ moods prior to their completing an emotional memory task. For mood manipulation, young (n = 147) and older (n = 111) adults viewed a positive, negative, or neutral video lasting 3 min. To validate the mood induction, we collected self-reported ratings of valence and arousal (affective slider; Betella and Verschure, 2016) at baseline, after the video, and after the memory task. The memory task consisted of incidental encoding of 30 intermixed pictures (10 positive, 10 negative, 10 neutral valence), followed by free recall. The mood manipulation changed people’s self-reported valence, yet it did not influence self-reported arousal. The memory task revealed a consistent negativity bias in young adults. Older adults recalled negative and positive pictures equally well in all conditions. After viewing a negative video, they recalled positive pictures more often than neutral pictures, but did not show the same advantage for negative pictures over neutral pictures. This positive memory advantage was weaker in the positive mood condition. Therefore, mood manipulation influenced in part older adults’ emotional memory bias, showing some signs of mood incongruence which we discuss in terms of emotion regulation. This shows the importance of accounting for mood differences in studies on aging and memory. The robust age group differences support the view that the positivity effect in aging is the result of a negativity bias that fades with age.

Treating sleep and circadian problems to promote mental health: perspectives on comorbidity, implementation science and behavior change

Insufficient sleep and mistimed sleep are prominent, yet under-appreciated and understudied, contributors to poor mental health and to mental disorders. The evidence that improving sleep and circadian functioning is an important pathway to mental health continues to mount. The goal of this paper is to highlight three major challenges ahead. Challenge 1 points to the possibility that comorbidity is the norm not the exception for the sleep and circadian disorders that are associated with mental disorders. Hence, the sleep and circadian problems experienced by people diagnosed with a mental disorder may not fit into the neat diagnostic categories of existing nosologies nor be adequately treated with single disorder approaches. The Sleep Health Framework and the Transdiagnostic Intervention for Sleep and Circadian Dysfunction (TranS-C) are discussed as alternative approaches. Challenge 2 points to the large time lag between the development of a treatment and the availability of that treatment in routine clinical practice. This is a key reason for the emergence of implementation science, which is a flourishing, well-developed, and quickly moving field. There is an urgent need for more applications of implementation science within sleep and circadian science. Challenge 3 describes one of the greatest puzzles of our time-the need to unlock the fundamental elements of behavior change. There is potential to harness the science of behavior change to encourage widespread engagement in sleep health behavior and thereby reduce the staggering burden of sleep and circadian problems and the associated mental health problems.

The limited roles of cognitive capabilities and future time perspective in contributing to positivity effects

When compared to younger adults, older adults tend to favor positive over negative information in attention and memory. This is known as the positivity effect. Although this is a robust phenomenon, there is still debate about how it relates to individual differences in cognitive capabilities and future time perspective (FTP). To address this, we investigated how measures of fluid cognitive capabilities and FTP related to positivity effects within the domains of episodic memory, visual attention, and autobiographical memory. Cognitive capabilities were assessed using the National Institute of Health Toolbox Cognition battery, and included assessments of executive function, working memory, episodic memory, and processing speed. FTP was assessed via the Carstensen and Lang (1996) scale. Within our final sample (N = 196), we replicated positivity effects in all three task domains, which were all driven by age differences in how people responded to negative (but not positive) information. However, there was limited evidence that the magnitude of these age-related reductions in negativity varied as a function of individual differences in older adults' cognitive capabilities or FTP. Furthermore, when FTP did emerge as a predictor, the pattern was not in line with expectations based upon socioemotional selectivity theory. Thus, the positivity effect may be less reliant on cognitive capabilities and self-reported FTP than is often assumed. Given that there was also very little consistency in the extent to which participants displayed positivity effects across the task domains, these results also raise the possibility that there may be multiple mechanisms underlying positivity effects.