The influence of emotional salience and age on a laboratory measure of prospective memory

Emotional factors have been found to be an important influence on memory. The current study investigated the influence of emotional salience and age on a laboratory measure of prospective memory (PM) using Virtual Week. Virtual Week is a laboratory based test of prospective memory that simulates a week of activities in a computerised board game format. This includes simulated activities that require participants to carry out prospective memory tasks. They are scored on completion and timeliness. Thirty young and thirty old adults completed Virtual Week, in which the emotional salience of the tasks at encoding was manipulated to be positive, negative or neutral in content. Background data includes age, gender, years of education, self rated health, depression scale (HADS), dementia scale screening (ACER), vocabulary test score (Mill Hill) and general mental ability test (Raven). For event-based, but not time-based tasks, positivity enhancement in both age groups was seen, with a greater number of positive PM tasks being performed relative to neutral tasks. There was no negativity enhancement effect. Older adults showed generally poorer levels of PM, but they also demonstrated greater beneficial effects of positive valence compared to young. These effects of emotion on PM accuracy do not appear to reflect the retrospective component of the task as a different pattern of emotion effects was seen on the recall of PM content. Results indicate that older adults’ difficulties in prospective remembering can be reduced where the tasks to be remembered are positive. Primary data, experimental data. SPSS files

情绪因素已被证实对记忆具有重要影响。本研究采用Virtual Week范式，探究情绪显著性与年龄对实验室前瞻记忆（prospective memory, PM）测试的影响。Virtual Week是一款基于实验室的前瞻记忆测试工具，以电脑化桌游形式模拟一周日常活动，其中包含各类需参与者完成前瞻记忆任务的模拟场景，任务得分以完成情况与及时性作为评判依据。本研究招募30名青年与30名老年成年人参与该实验，对编码阶段任务的情绪显著性进行操控，将任务内容分为正性、负性与中性三类。收集的背景数据涵盖年龄、性别、受教育年限、自评健康状况、抑郁量表（HADS）、痴呆筛查量表（ACER）、词汇测试得分（Mill Hill）以及一般心理能力测试（Raven）。针对基于事件的前瞻记忆任务（而非基于时间的任务），两个年龄组均呈现出正性情绪增益效应，即完成的正性前瞻记忆任务数量显著多于中性任务；未观察到负性情绪增益效应。老年群体的前瞻记忆整体表现较差，但相较于青年群体，他们从正性效价中获得的获益更为显著。情绪对前瞻记忆准确率的上述影响似乎并不涉及任务的回溯性成分，因为在对前瞻记忆内容的回忆任务中，情绪效应呈现出截然不同的模式。研究结果表明，当需记忆的任务具备正性情绪色彩时，可有效缓解老年群体的前瞻记忆障碍。本数据集包含原始数据与实验数据，格式为SPSS文件。