Memory in posttraumatic stress disorder: Properties of voluntary and involuntary, traumatic and nontraumatic autobiographical memories in people with and without posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms.

One hundred fifteen undergraduates rated 15 word-cued memories and their 3 most negatively stressful, 3 most positive, and 7 most important events and completed tests of personality and depression. Eighty-nine also recorded involuntary memories online for 1 week. In the first 3-way comparisons needed to test existing theories, comparisons were made of memories of stressful events versus control events and involuntary versus voluntary memories in people high versus low in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity. For all participants, stressful memories had more emotional intensity, more frequent voluntary and involuntary retrieval, but not more fragmentation. For all memories, participants with greater PTSD symptom severity showed the same differences. Involuntary memories had more emotional intensity and less centrality to the life story than voluntary memories. Meeting the diagnostic criteria for traumatic events had no effect, but the emotional responses to events did. In 533 undergraduates, correlations among measures were replicated and the Negative Intensity factor of the Affect Intensity Measure correlated with PTSD symptom severity. No special trauma mechanisms were needed to account for the results, which are summarized by the autobiographical memory theory of PTSD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Voluntary and involuntary access to autobiographical memory

Involuntary autobiographical memories recorded in a diary study are compared to voluntary autobiographical memories retrieved in response to verbal cues in a laboratory. The verbal cues were generated to be comparable to the cues that were found to elicit the involuntary memories. The findings demonstrate that voluntary and involuntary retrieval may access different samples of autobiographical memories. The voluntary memories were (1) less specific, (2) more frequently rehearsed, and (3) less emotionally positive than the involuntary memories. A reanalysis of the diary study examined conditions of involuntary retrieval. The memories occurred most frequently when attention was diffuse. They were typically triggered by environmental cues matching central features of the remembered event. The findings are discussed in relation to current models of autobiographical memory.     

Becoming a better person: Temporal remoteness biases autobiographical memories for moral events.

Our autobiographical self depends on the differential recollection of our personal past, notably including memories of morally laden events. Whereas both emotion and temporal recency are well known to influence memory, very little is known about how we remember moral events, and in particular about the distribution in time of memories for events that were blameworthy or praiseworthy. To investigate this issue in detail, we collected a novel database of 758 confidential, autobiographical narratives for personal moral events from 100 well-characterized healthy adults. Negatively valenced moral memories were significantly more remote than positively valenced memories, both as measured by the valence of the cue word that evoked the memory as well as by the content of the memory itself. The effect was independent of chronological age, ethnicity, gender or personality, arguing for a general emotional bias in how we construct our moral autobiography. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Are the memories of older adults positively biased?

There is disagreement in the literature about whether a "positivity effect" in memory performance exists in older adults. To assess the generalizability of the effect, the authors examined memory for autobiographical, picture, and word information in a group of younger (17-29 years old) and older (60-84 years old) adults. For the autobiographical memory task, the authors asked participants to produce 4 positive, 4 negative, and 4 neutral recent autobiographical memories and to recall these a week later. For the picture and word tasks, participants studied photos or words of different valences (positive, negative, neutral) and later remembered them on a free-recall test. The authors found significant correlations in memory performance, across task material, for recall of both positive and neutral valence autobiographical events, pictures, and words. When the authors examined accurate memories, they failed to find consistent evidence, across the different types of material, of a positivity effect in either age group. However, the false memory findings offer more consistent support for a positivity effect in older adults. During recall of all 3 types of material, older participants recalled more false positive than false negative memories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Autobiographical memory in schizophrenia: An examination of the distribution of memories.

Patients with schizophrenia display numerous memory impairments. Examination of autobiographical memory distribution across the life span can constrain theories of how schizophrenia affects memory. Previously, schizophrenic patients were shown to produce fewer memories from early adulthood than from childhood or the recent past (A. Feinstein, T. E. Goldberg, B. Nowlin, & D. R. Weinberger, 1998), this temporal paucity corresponding with illness onset. The current study examined this issue further using a different (noncued) method. Age-matched schizophrenic patients (n = 21) and controls (n = 21) were to freely generate 50 episodes, after which they dated these memories. Patients generated fewer memories than did controls, especially from the recent decade. When the overall lower production of memories was controlled for, the groups displayed equivalent recency effects. It was concluded that patients' paucity of memories generated from the recent decade reflects encoding or acquisition problems, which may be associated with the illness period. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Autobiographical memory, autonoetic consciousness, and self-perspective in aging.

In this study, the authors examined the effects of aging on autobiographical memory in 180 participants by means of a new method designed to assess across 5 lifetime periods the nature of memories-that is, specificity and spontaneity--and the phenomenal experience of remembering--that is, self-perspective and autonoetic consciousness--via the field/observer and remember/know paradigms respectively. Age-related differences were found for the specificity and spontaneity of memories and the phenomenal experience of remembering. There was an increase in observer and know responses with age, but a decrease in field and remember responses and in the ability to justify them by recalling sensory-perceptive, affective, or spatiotemporal specific details. This pattern confirms the existence of a semantic-episodic dissociation in autobiographical memory in aging. Moreover, the data support the view that older participants can subjectively "travel back in time" to relive personal events in the most distant past better than those in the recent past. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Goal-directed memory: The role of cognitive control in older adults' emotional memory.

The present study revealed that older adults recruit cognitive control processes to strengthen positive and diminish negative information in memory. In Experiment 1, older adults engaged in more elaborative processing when retrieving positive memories than they did when retrieving negative memories. In Experiment 2, older adults who did well on tasks involving cognitive control were more likely than those doing poorly to favor positive pictures in memory. In Experiment 3, older adults who were distracted during memory encoding no longer favored positive over negative pictures in their later recall, revealing that older adults use cognitive resources to implement emotional goals during encoding. In contrast, younger adults showed no signs of using cognitive control to make their memories more positive, indicating that, for them, emotion regulation goals are not chronically activated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Collaborative remembering in older adults: Age-invariant outcomes in the context of episodic recall deficits.

Rapidly growing research reveals complex yet systematic consequences of collaboration on memory in young adults, but much less is known about this phenomenon in older adults. Young and older adults studied a list of categorized words and took three successive recall tests. Test 1 and 3 were always taken individually, and Test 2 was done either in triads or alone. Despite older adults recalling less overall than young adults, both age groups exhibited similar costs and benefits of collaboration: Collaboration reduced both correct and false recall during collaborative remembering, was associated with more positive beliefs about its value, and produced reminiscence, collective memory, and some forgetting in its cascading effects on postcollaborative recall. We examine the role of retrieval organization in these effects. As environmental support may play a substantial role in healthy aging, the relatively preserved effects of collaboration on memory in older adults hold promise for testing judicious uses of group remembering in aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and fluency-based illusions in recognition memory.

We examined age-related differences in susceptibility to fluency-based memory illusions. The results from 2 experiments, in which 2 different methods were used to enhance the fluency of recognition test items, revealed that older and young adults did not differ significantly in terms of their overall susceptibility to this type of memory illusion. Older and young adults were also similar in that perceptual fluency did not influence recognition memory responses when there was a mismatch in the sensory modality of the study and test phases. Likewise, a more conceptual fluency manipulation influenced recognition memory responses in both older and young adults regardless of the match in modality. Overall, the results indicate that older adults may not be more vulnerable than young adults to fluency-based illusions of recognition memory. Moreover, young and older adults appear to be comparable in their sensitivity to factors that modulate the influence of fluency on recognition decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Monitoring one's own forgetting in younger and older adults.

The present study examined whether there are age-related differences in the ability to accurately monitor forgetting. Young and older adults studied a mixed list of categorized words, and later recalled items when cued with each category. They then estimated the number of additional items that they did not recall—a form of monitoring one's forgetting. Older adults exhibited impaired memory performance compared with young adults, but also accurately estimated they forgot more information than young adults. Both age groups were fairly accurate in predicting forgetting in terms of resolution, indicating that aging does not impair the ability to monitor forgetting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and autobiographical memory: Dissociating episodic from semantic retrieval.

Cognitive aging research documents reduced access to contextually specific episodic details in older adults, whereas access to semantic or other nonepisodic information is preserved or facilitated. The present study extended this finding to autobiographical memory by using a new measure: the Autobiographical Interview. Younger and older adults recalled events from 5 life periods. Protocols were scored according to a reliable system for categorizing episodic and nonepisodic information. Whereas younger adults were biased toward episodic details reflecting happenings, locations, perceptions, and thoughts, older adults favored semantic details not connected to a particular time and place. This pattern persisted after additional structured probing for contextual details. The Autobiographical Interview is a useful instrument for quantifying episodic and semantic contributions to personal remote memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

False memories in children and adults: Age, distinctiveness, and subjective experience.

This study investigated developmental trends associated with the Deese/Roediger-McDermott false-memory effect, the role of distinctive information in false-memory formation, and participants' subjective experience of true and false memories. Children (5- and 7-year-olds) and adults studied lists of semantically associated words. Half of the participants studied words alone, and half studied words accompanied by pictures. There were significant age differences in recall (5-year-olds evinced more false memories than did adults) but not in recognition of critical lures. Distinctive information reduced false memory for all age groups. Younger children provided with distinctive information, and older children and adults regardless of whether they viewed distinctive information, expressed higher levels of confidence in true than in false memories. Source attributions did not significantly differ between true and false memories. Implications for theories of false memory and memory development are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Things that go bump in your life: Explaining the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory.

Two experiments explore the reminiscence bump (RB)—the disproportionately higher recall of early-life memories—by older adults. In Experiment 1, participants in the age ranges of 36–40, 46–50, and 56–60 recalled events freely or under instructions to avoid recent memories. Constraint did not affect older participants but resulted in the appearance of an RB in younger participants. In Experiment 2, recall was constrained to particular life periods. Memories from these periods were compared for ease of retrieval and along subjective dimensions (e.g. vividness). Memories from early life were more easily retrieved, but this was not due to differences in subjective qualities. A higher proportion of memories for first-time events were identified from early life, and these memories were more easily retrievable. The results are discussed in relation to an existing model of autobiographical memory, and a revised model is put forward. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intentional suppression of unwanted memories grows more difficult as we age.

People often encounter reminders to memories that they would prefer not to think about. When this happens, they often try to exclude the unwanted memory from awareness, a process that relies upon inhibitory control. We propose that the ability to regulate awareness of unwanted memories through inhibition declines with advancing age. In two experiments, we examined younger and older adults' ability to intentionally suppress retrieval when repeatedly confronted with reminders to an experience they were instructed to not think about. Older adults exhibited significantly less forgetting of the suppressed items compared to younger adults on a later independent probe test of recall, indicating that older adults failed to inhibit the to-be-avoided memories. These findings demonstrate that the ability to intentionally regulate conscious awareness of unwanted memories through inhibitory control declines with age, highlighting differences in memory control that may be of clinical relevance in the aftermath of unpleasant life events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Instructional manipulations and age differences in memory: Now you see them, now you don't.

The instructions for most explicit memory tests use language that emphasizes the memorial component of the task. This language may put older adults at a disadvantage relative to younger adults because older adults believe that their memories have deteriorated. Consequently, typical explicit memory tests may overestimate age-related decline in cognitive performance. In 2 experiments, age differences were obtained when the instructions emphasized the memory component of the task (memory emphasis) but not when the instructions did not emphasize memory (memory neutral). These findings suggest that aspects of the testing situation, such as experimental instructions, may exaggerate age differences in memory performance and need to be considered when designing studies investigating age differences in memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Models of visuospatial and verbal memory across the adult life span.

The authors investigated the distinctiveness and interrelationships among visuospatial and verbal memory processes in short-term, working, and long-term memories in 345 adults. Beginning in the 20s, a continuous, regular decline occurs for processing-intensive tasks (e.g., speed of processing, working memory, and long-term memory), whereas verbal knowledge increases across the life span. There is little differentiation in the cognitive architecture of memory across the life span. Visuospatial and verbal working memory are distinct but highly interrelated systems with domain-specific short-term memory subsystems. In contrast to recent neuroimaging data, there is little evidence for dedifferentiation of function at the behavioral level in old compared with young adults. The authors conclude that efforts to connect behavioral and brain data yield a more complete understanding of the aging mind. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Collaboration reduces the frequency of false memories in older and younger adults.

Older (mean age = 74.23) and younger (mean age = 33.50) participants recalled items from 6 briefly exposed household scenes either alone or with their spouses. Collaborative recall was compared with the pooled, nonredundant recall of spouses remembering alone (nominal groups). The authors examined hits, self-generated false memories, and false memories produced by another person's (actually a computer program's) misleading recollections. Older adults reported fewer hits and more self-generated false memories than younger adults. Relative to nominal groups, older and younger collaborating groups reported fewer hits and fewer self-generated false memories. Collaboration also reduced older people's computer-initiated false memories. The memory conversations in the collaborative groups were analyzed for evidence that collaboration inhibits the production of errors and/or promotes quality control processes that detect and eliminate errors. Only older adults inhibited the production of wrong answers, but both age groups eliminated errors during their discussions. The partners played an important role in helping rememberers discard false memories in older and younger couples. The results support the use of collaboration to reduce false recall in both younger and older adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and integration of contingency evidence in causal judgment.

Age differences in causal judgment are consistently greater for preventative/negative relationships than for generative/positive relationships. In this study, a feature analytic procedure (Mandel & Lehman, 1998) was used to determine whether this effect might be due to differences in young and older adults’ integration of contingency evidence during causal induction. To reduce the impact of age-related changes in learning/memory, the authors presented contingency evidence for preventative, noncontingent, and generative relationships in summary form; the meaningfulness of causal context was varied to induce participants to integrate greater or lesser amounts of this evidence. Young adults showed greater flexibility in their integration processes than did older adults. In an abstract causal context, there were no age differences in causal judgment or integration, but in meaningful contexts, young adults’ judgments for preventative relationships were more accurate than older adults’ and young adults assigned more weight to the contingency evidence confirming these relationships. These differences were mediated by age-related changes in processing speed. The decline in this basic cognitive resource may place boundaries on the amount or type of evidence that older adults can integrate for causal judgment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and the misinformation effect: A neuropsychological analysis.

Older adults' susceptibility to misinformation in an eyewitness memory paradigm was examined in two experiments. Experiment 1 showed that older adults are more susceptible to interfering misinformation than are younger adults on two different tests (old-new recognition and source monitoring). Experiment 2 examined the extent to which processes associated with frontal lobe functioning underlie older adults' source-monitoring difficulties. Older adults with lower frontal-lobe-functioning scores on neuropsychological tests were particularly susceptible to false memories in the misinformation paradigm. The authors' results agree with data from other false memory paradigms that show greater false recollections in older adults, especially in those who scored poorly on frontal tests. The results support a source-monitoring account of aging and illusory recollection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)