Memory for emotional and social information in adulthood and old age

Abstract

This chapter reviews the research examining how the effects of age on memory are influenced by the emotional and social nature of the events in question. We first focus on how age may affect the way that emotional information is attended, stored in memory, and retrieved. We then discuss how age affects memory for social information, distinguishing the processing of self from the processing of others. In each domain, we describe both the cognitive changes that occur with aging and the extant data about their neural underpinnings. Although there is yet to be an agreed upon theoretical framework to account for the effects of aging in either of these domains, where possible we describe the theories that have been put forth and discuss the evidence in light of those theories.