ABSTRACT
As we have discussed, aging can sometimes have a less detrimental effect on emotion processing than on cognitive processing. Thus, older adults tend not to show declines in emotion processing, and they remain very good at maintaining and comparing emotional states that have occurred at varying time points. In the next two chapters, we explore the effects of emotion on older adults’ declarative long-term memories. As discussed in Chapters 6 through 8, emotion can exert a variety of effects on young adults’ long-term memories. Emotion can influence the likelihood that an event is remembered, it can influence the subjective vividness of a memory, and it can influence the types of details that are likely to be remembered about an event. In this chapter, we explore how aging influences each of these effects of emotion on memory.
