FRIDAY, June 6, 2003 (HealthDayNews) --
As you get older, your memory just naturally seems to focus on the positive and dispose of the negative.
So says a report by University of California and Stanford University psychologists that appears in the June issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
The psychologists found that, compared with younger adults, older adults recalled fewer negative than positive images. The older people were, the more they displayed the memory bias favoring the recall of positive images.
It was previously found that older people are able to regulate their emotions more effectively than younger people. They do that by maintaining positive feelings and lowering negative feelings.
The University of California and Stanford University psychologists wanted to understand how older people do that. The researchers decided to focus on the role that memory plays in the process.
They did two studies that examined age-related differences in peoples' memories of positive, negative and neutral images of people, animals, nature scenes and inanimate objects.
The first study included 144 people in age groups of 18-29, 41-53 and 65-80. It found the older adults recalled fewer negative images than positive or neutral images.
The second study included 64 people in the age groups of 19 to 30 and 63 to 86. In this study, the researchers ruled out mood as a factor by testing the study subjects for mood and depression before they viewed the images. Mood affected younger and older people alike, ruling it out as a factor.
This study also found the older people recalled fewer negative images than the younger people.
"With age, people place increasingly more value on emotionally meaningful goals and thus invest more cognitive and behavioral resources in obtaining them," the study authors write.
More information
Here's where you can learn more about the brain and aging.
