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Age Differences in Positivity During Episodic Future Thought

Age Differences in Positivity During Episodic Future Thought. Lisa Emery, Stephanie Hale, & Emily Booze. agelabs.appstate.edu. Episodic Future Thought. “Mental Time Travel” into the future to imagine specific episodes Highly related to autobiographical memory

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Age Differences in Positivity During Episodic Future Thought

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  1. Age Differences in Positivity During Episodic Future Thought Lisa Emery, Stephanie Hale, & Emily Booze agelabs.appstate.edu

  2. Episodic Future Thought • “Mental Time Travel” into the future to imagine specific episodes • Highly related to autobiographical memory • Activates similar brain regions (e.g., Addis, Wong & Schacter, 2008a; Viard et al. 2011) • Shows similar phenomenological characteristics (e.g., D’Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2004) • Performance on ABM & EFT tasks highly correlated (Hill & Emery, 2013)

  3. Aging & EFT • Older adults produce fewer episodic details in EFT (and ABM) than young adults (Addis et al. 2008b; Levine et al., 2002; Piolino et al., 2010) • Attributed primarily to decline in associative memory and/or executive function • Recent studies suggest memory isn’t the only age difference (Gaesser et al., 2001; Rendell et al., 2012).

  4. Aging & Emotion • “Positivity Bias”: Compared to the young, older adults: • Remember past events more positively (Kennedy, Mather, & Carstensen, 2004; Comblain, D’Argembeau, & Van der Linden, 2005) • Use more positive and fewer negative words when describing memories (Pennebaker & Stone, 2003; Schryer et al., 2012)

  5. The Current Study • Does the “positivity bias” extend to future events

  6. Method Participants • Young adults (ages 20-30; M = 23.8; N = 19) • Middle-aged adults (ages 40-50; M = 45.2; N = 16) • Older adults (ages 60-70; M = 63.6; N = 13)

  7. Method Materials & Procedure • Cue Word Retrieval/Construction • 2 (Event Direction: Past vs. Future) x 2 (Event Distance: Near vs. Far) • 4 trials of each type, 16 trials total • 3 minutes to retrieve and describe the event

  8. Method • Linguistic Inquiry & Word Count (LIWC2007; Pennebaker et al., 2007) • Word counts • Positive Words (e.g., Love, Sweet, Nice) • Negative Words (e.g., Hurt, Ugly, Nasty)

  9. Results

  10. Results

  11. Results

  12. Results

  13. Results

  14. Conclusions & Future Directions • Past events = reduced negativity • Future events = increased positivity

  15. Conclusions & Future Directions • Might age-related emotional changes impact memory specificity? • Positive mood produces greater heuristic processing (Emery, Hess, & Elliot, 2012) • Repeated use of “Functional Avoidance” of negative or traumatic memories may lead to “overgeneral autobiographical memory” (Williams et al., 2007)

  16. Conclusions & Future Directions Emery & Griffin, 2014

  17. Come see our posters! Poster Session 2: Friday April 4, 4:00 – 6:30 PM Poster 63: AGE DIFFERENCES IN PERFORMANCE ON FINANCIAL GAMES Elizabeth Payment, Lisa Emery, Erica Camp Poster Session 4: Saturday, April 5, 4:00 PM – 6:30 PM Poster 9: AGE-RELATED DIFFERENCES IN RETRIEVAL OF EPISODIC AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORIES Heather Burkett, SimonaGizdarska, Meagan Griffin, Lisa Emery Reprints of presentations, papers, & posters @ agelabs.appstate.edu

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