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Introduction to the Special Section on EmotionCognition Interactions andthe Aging Mind

Fredda Blanchard-FieldsGeorgia Institute of Technology

This editorial previews the articles that appear in the special

section on emotion cognition interactions and the aging mind.

These articles examine in older adults the degree to which intact

emotional processing affects, and perhaps enhances, what has

more traditionally been considered purely cognitive processing.

Thus, they help advance researchers understanding of the com-

plex interplay between emotion and cognition and raise important

questions for future research in this area.

Decades of research have yielded an abundance of empirical

studies demonstrating that older adults show decline in comparisonto young adults across a wide variety of cognitive tasks (for

review, see Zacks, Hasher, & Li, 2000). These declines occur in a

number of areas of cognitive functioning, such as sensory func-

tioning, working memory, attention, and executive abilities that tax

deliberative, effortful information processing (Park, 2002; Zacks et

al., 2000). Of course, not all types of memory are affected equally.

For example, systems that require less deliberative processing,

such as semantic memory, do not necessarily decline with age. Of

particular interest to this special section is that, along with the

research on cognitive decline, there are a growing number of

studies that demonstrate that emotional experience and emotion

regulation remain intact and may even improve across adulthood

(Blanchard-Fields, 1998; Charles, Mather, & Carstensen, 2003;Rahhal, May, & Hasher, 2002). Given the different developmental

trajectories of the emotion system and cognitive systems that

require deliberative processing, there has been a recent surge of

interest in investigating their interactions in the aging mind

(Carstensen & Mikels, 2005; Mather, 2004). Accordingly, evi-

dence is mounting that suggests that emotional variables improve

performance on cognitive tasks (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005). At

the same time, it is important to note that there are also inconsis-

tencies in the literature. On the one hand, there are quite a few

memory studies that have found that older adults remember pro-

portionally more positive relative to negative information more so

than do young adults, despite the fact that the absolute amount of

information retained is lower in older adults (Carstensen & Mikels,

2005; Charles et al., 2003; Mather & Carstensen, 2003). Thisphenomenon is typically referred to as a positivity effect. On the

other hand, there are studies that demonstrate a memory enhance-

ment for negative information in older adults (Kensinger, Brierley,

Medford, Growdon, & Corkin, 2002; Denburg, Buchanan, Tranel,

& Adolphs, 2003). There are two major issues that arise from these

findings and that are the focus of this special section. First, what

are the conditions that determine when a positivity effect can be

observed in older adults? In other words, what are the systematic

differences in studies where these effects are found and where they

are not found?

Second, given the evidence for a positivity effect in older adults,

what are the mechanisms that account for this preferential treat-

ment of positive information over negative information? Is this

relative preference compensatory in nature? In other words, do

intact emotional processes ameliorate cognitive decline? For ex-ample, what is the role of emotion regulation in processing infor-

mation? Or do these interactions represent a constellation of spared

processes? That is, do the mechanisms responsible for these emo-

tional performance advantages operate independently of cognitive

functioning?

The articles proposed for this special section present varied

research projects that examine how emotional factors influence

cognitive performance in long-term memory, working memory,

source memory, and social judgments. The goal of this compila-

tion of work is to begin to provide some answers to the above

questions, while underscoring a recent surge in emotioncognition

and aging investigations.

The first two articles provide evidence for a positivity effect inolder adults emotional memory. The first article focuses on work-

ing memory for affective versus visual information, and the second

article examines the role of executive processes in an observed

positivity effect in older adults memory for pictures. Mikels,

Larkin, Reuter-Lorenz, and Carstensen (2005) extend research on

the positivity effect in older adults to working memory. First, they

found evidence of a cognitive process that appears to remain intact

in older adults. Working memory involving judging the intensity

of affective pictorial information showed no age differences, in

contrast to working memory tasks involving intensity judgments of

visual information, which did demonstrate the typical age differ-

ences (i.e., young adults performed better than did older adults).

Second, a positivity effect in older adults was found. In the

affective working memory task, older adults performed better onpositive relative to negative emotion trials, whereas young adults

displayed the opposite pattern. The contributions of this article are

twofold. First, the authors have developed an elegant new task to

tap cognitive processing of emotional material. Second, they dem-

onstrate not only the positivity effect in older adults but also a

corresponding negativity effect in young adults. Although not

directly examined, their findings are suggestive of the fact that

executive processes associated with emotion-related working

memory may be unimpaired with age. In addition, it may be the

case that older adults superior ability to regulate emotions influ-

ences their success at this task. This is also taken up in the Mather

Fredda Blanchard-Fields, School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of

Technology.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Fredda

Blanchard-Fields, School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Psychology,

Atlanta, GA 30332-0170. E-mail: [email protected]

Psychology and Aging Copyright 2005 by the American Psychological Association2005, Vol. 20, No. 4, 539 541 0882-7974/05/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0882-7974.20.4.539

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and Knight (2005) article. What remains to be seen is whether this

age difference involves differential allocation of limited resources

to emotionally gratifying or positive information (Carstensen &

Mikels, 2005), perhaps at the cost of other forms of functioning or

a spared cognitive process in itself.

Mather and Knight (2005) also demonstrate a positivity effect in

older adults and a negativity effect in young adults in pictorialemotion memory. In addition to demonstrating this effect, they

also focus on the role executive control processes play in the

positivity effect. In fact, they find that age-related differences in

emotion memory are associated with higher levels of cognitive

control. As in the Mikels et al. (2005) study, they also speculate

that although there may be a motivational preference for encoding

positive information on the part of older adults, such processing

goals are necessary but not sufficient to produce the positivity

effect. Only those older adults with higher levels of cognitive

control exhibited this effect. In addition, when cognitive control

was reduced in older adults, the positivity effect was attenuated.

These two studies demonstrate nicely that it is not emotion-related

goals or cognitive decline alone that can account for these findings.

Instead, it is an interaction between the two systems. In particular,Mather and Knight find that cognitive capacity in the form of

control processes is needed to implement ones processing goals.

Again, similar to Mikels et al., Mather and Knight further suggest

that such cognitive control processes are necessary for emotion

regulation and can easily deplete resources. This becomes relevant

when discussing the Mienaltowski and Blanchard-Fields (2005)

article. First, the next two articles are previewed in that they were

less successful in demonstrating the positivity effect. Thus, they

provide important information as to the conditions under which the

positivity effect is observed.

The article by May, Rahhal, Berry, and Leighton (2005) exam-

ines the differential preferences for emotional information in older

adults on source memory. They focused primarily on the degree towhich older adults spontaneously focus on meaningful, emotion-

ally laden dimensions when encoding information. They effec-

tively teased apart whether older adults focus on the emotional or

conceptual nature of the information presented. Indeed, they found

a memorial advantage for emotion-related source memory relative

to neutral information. It is interesting that, as in the Mikels et al.

(2005) study, older adults ability to process and retain contextual

information that was emotionally laden remained intact, whereas

older adults ability to retain contextual information that was

strictly perceptual or conceptual information that was neutral in

valence was worse than that of young adults. However, it is not

clear whether the advantage was based on older adults tendency to

focus on negative, positive, or both types of information. Thus far,

their conclusion was that the emotional nature of the stimuli, ingeneral, influenced source memory in older adults. An important

implication of May et al.s findings is that the memorial advantage

of processing emotion-laden information may be driving increased

elaborative processing of the emotion-laden material. Thus, again

examining the interaction between emotion and cognition is an

optimal method toward understanding older adults cognitive pro-

cessing. It raises the following important question: Does this

motivational tendency to engage emotion-related information

evoke more elaborative processing, leading to better recall?

With a novel approach to examining emotioncognition inter-

actions in memory, Gruhn, Smith, and Baltes (2005) examined the

positivity effect for lists of words that were either homogeneous in

valence (e.g., all negative or all positive) or heterogeneous in

valence (e.g., including positive, negative, and neutral words). The

authors argue that heterogeneous, but not homogeneous, lists

evoke selective processing on the part of older adults, (i.e., they

provide strong cues to select words for processing based on va-

lence). Thus, if a positivity effect exists, it should be observedunder these conditions. However, their findings offer no evidence

of a positivity effect in older adults under either condition. Instead,

they found that both older and young adults recalled more negative

than positive words. In addition, this emotion-based prioritization

(negativity effect) was greater for young adults than for older

adults. This finding, of course, coincides nicely with a large

literature on young adults indicating that, compared with other

stimuli, negative information attracts more processing resources.

The contrasting age differences found in this study, as compared

with the Mikels et al. (2005) study and the Mather and Knight

(2005) study, yield important information regarding researchers

understanding of emotioncognition interactions. First, why is it

that the negativity effect for older adults was attenuated? Similar to

all of the authors in this special section, these authors argue that ifolder adults indeed display intact emotion regulation abilities, it

may be the case that they down-regulate negative affect, and this

may reduce the ability to make effective comparisons between

negative and positive stimuli. The interesting question raised is

whether the positivity effect is actually a reduced negativity effect

on the part of older adults. In addition, an important question to ask

is whether older adults actively divert attention away from nega-

tive information or whether they just are not able to process this

information as well as young adults. These questions, again, apply

to all of the studies thus far and warrant future research.

In all of the articles previewed thus far, reference has been made

to a possible mechanism for the positivity effect, the resource

demands encountered when engaging in emotion regulation. Thefinal article by Mienaltowski and Blanchard-Fields (2005) in this

special section directly examines emotion induction and its effect

on social judgments. They examined the age-related differential

influence of induced positive and negative emotion on the ability

to objectively make social judgments. Contrary to research sug-

gesting that negative mood induction evokes more elaborative

processing, resulting (in this case) in a reduced judgment bias, a

reduced judgment bias was more prominent for older adults in the

positive mood condition. In other words, they were, for example,

appropriately less confident in a tenuous judgment when their

mood was positive than when it was negative. The authors argue

that it may be the case, as with the above studies, that older adults

were engaging in emotion repair in the negative mood condition.

Given that emotion regulation is resource depleting, they may nothave processed the details necessary to make a more appropriate

social judgment. Again, the possibility that older adults spontane-

ously engage in the emotion regulation of negative mood or

information may be an important factor influencing their cognitive

processing. In this case, its influence is disadvantageous to making

appropriate social judgments.

The articles in this special section begin to answer the questions

put forth in this introduction. They offer two conditions under

which a positivity effect in older adulthood is observed. First, it

appears to depend on the older adults cognitive capacity level, in

this case, executive cognitive control. Second, it appears to depend

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on the nature of the task, such as whether information is presented

in a comparative framework (i.e., heterogeneous lists) or not (i.e.,

homogeneous lists). In addition, what is not addressed in the above

studies is that the nature of the stimuli under investigation also

differed (e.g., pictures vs. words). This also could affect when the

positivity effect is observed. With respect to mechanisms, concep-

tually relevant, emotion-laden information, in general, may serveas a trigger for more elaborative processing on the part of older

adults. Finally, age-related differences in emotion regulation may

also play an important role in determining when a positivity effect

will be observed. Although none of the studies directly assessed

how emotion regulation may produce a positivity effect, they will

serve as catalysts for future research to examine this possibility.

This set of articles highlights the importance of the recent

increase in attention to emotioncognition interactions in the aging

mind. They raise important new critical questions to be posed

about cognitive aging when taking into consideration the function-

ing emotional system. In addition, they also offer novel and

valuable frameworks for providing empirical answers to those

questions.

References

Blanchard-Fields, F. (1998). The role of emotion in social cognition across

the adult life span. In K. W. Schaie & M. P. Lawton (Eds.), Annual

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adult development (pp. 238 265). New York: Springer.

Carstensen, L. L., & Mikels, J. A. (2005). At the intersection of emotion

and cognition: Aging and the positivity effect. Current Directions in

Psychological Science, 14, 117121.

Charles, S. T., Mather, M., & Carstensen, L. L. (2003). Focusing on the

positive: Age differences in memory for positive, negative, and neutral

stimuli. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 85, 163178.

Denburg, N. L., Buchanan, T. W., Tranel, D., & Adolphs, R. (2003).

Evidence for preserved emotional memory in normal elderly persons.

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Gruhn, D., Smith, J., & Baltes, P. B. (2005). No aging bias favoring

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Kensinger, E. A., Brierley, B., Medford, N., Growdon, J. H., & Corkin, S.(2002). The effect of normal aging and Alzheimers disease on emo-

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