January 2008
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Emotion has long been known to impact memory, with individuals generally showing heightened memory for emotional relative to neutral information. The mechanisms underlying this effect are still not clear, but the kinds of emotional material recalled by individuals may shed some light on this issue. The present investigation explored the type of emotional information recalled by younger and older adults across different contexts. The data suggest that younger adults tend to process negative information in an automatic, prioritized fashion across a variety of contexts, but that they can use incentive to attenuate this bias. Older adults also prioritize negative information, but are even more successful than young adults at shifting priority to positive material. The implications for theories regarding emotion and memory are discussed. Emotion has been shown to have a strong impact on cognitive processing across a number of domains (Buchanan and Adolphs). Emotion seems to impact attention, as individuals fixate longer, and are faster to detect and respond to emotional relative to neutral items (Ohman, Flykt, and Esteves; Phelps, Ling, and Carrasco). We devote more attention to processing negative social traits, and focus our attention on emotional components of a scene while neglecting neutral items or events (e.g., Anderson and Phelps; Burke, Heuer, and Reisberg; Christianson and Loftus, 1987, 1990, 1991; Wessel and Merckelbach). Emotion has been postulated to affect visual processing, allowing