Aging, Emotion, and Cognition: The Role of Strategies

In three experiments, I examined the role of emotions in arithmetic and investigated how this role changes with aging. I adopted a strategy approach and examined strategic aspects of participants' performance under emotionally neutral and negative conditions. The data showed that negative emotions led participants to (a) use fewer strategies and change how often they used each available strategy (Experiment 1), (b) select the better strategy on each problem less often while solving both easier and harder problems (Experiment 2), and (c) obtain poorer performance (Experiments 1 and 3), even when strategy repertoire, distribution, and selection were controlled. Regarding age-related differences, I found that negative emotions (a) influenced efficiency of strategy execution less strongly in older adults than in young adults, (b) affected young adults' strategy repertoire but not older adults', (c) changed strategy distributions more strongly in young than in older adults, and (d) influenced strategy selection to the same extent in both age groups. These effects of emotions on strategy repertoire, distribution, execution, and selection, and age-related differences in these effects have important implications for explaining how emotions influence the mechanisms underlying task performance and to improve our understanding of how influence of emotions on cognition changes during aging.