Age-Related Changes in Associative Memory for Emotional and Nonemotional Integrative Representations

Events often include novel combinations of items. Sometimes, through the process of integration, we experience and remember these items as parts of a whole rather than as separate entities. Recent research with younger adults has demonstrated that successfully integrating 2 nonemotional items at encoding, instead of imagining them separately, produces a disproportionately larger associative memory benefit than integrating an emotional and a nonemotional item. In the first study to examine whether age and emotion interact to influence integration, we used 2 measures of integrative success-the ability to successfully retrieve integrations, measured through associative cued recall, and the ability to successfully generate integrated representations at encoding, measured through self report. The cued-recall results (Experiments 1 and 2) revealed that the emotional content of the word pairs interacts to influence the effect of integration on older adults' associative memory, but in the opposite direction of younger adults: Older adults showed no associative retrieval benefit of integration over nonintegration for nonemotional pairs, but they showed a significant integrative benefit for emotional pairs. We also demonstrated (Experiment 2) that encoding time interacts with emotion and integration in different ways for older and younger adults: Putting younger adults under time pressure reduced their success in generating integrated representations at encoding for nonemotional pairs, whereas for older adults it disrupted their ability to generate integrated representations for emotional pairs. We discuss possible age-related differences in the processes used to create emotional and nonemotional integrations.