Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Preferring Positivity : Age Differences In Judgments Of Learning And Memory For Emotionally-Valenced Words, Edie Sanders

Honors Theses

Many changes occur with age, including changes in emotion regulation and memory. The Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (Carstensen, 2006) posits that older adults tend to be more concerned with emotionally meaningful goals and therefore experience what is called the “positivity effect” with age. The positivity effect results in a bias in attention and memory towards positive stimuli over neutral and negative stimuli. Age-related changes also arise in memory monitoring, specifically in Judgments of Learning (JOLs), when individuals learn emotional words. We examined the presence of the positivity effect in memory and JOLs for positive, negative, and neutral words. Younger and older …