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。本研究采用虚拟周（Virtual Week）范式，探究了情绪凸显性与年龄对实验室情境下前瞻记忆（prospective memory, PM）的影响。虚拟周是一种基于实验室的前瞻记忆测试，以电脑化桌游形式模拟一周的日常活动，其中包含要求被试完成前瞻记忆任务的模拟情境，最终根据任务完成情况与及时性进行评分。本研究招募30名青年被试与30名老年被试完成该任务，任务编码阶段的情绪凸显性被操控为积极、消极或中性三类内容。收集的背景数据包括年龄、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）、词汇测验得分（Mill Hill）以及一般心理能力测验（Raven）。针对基于事件的前瞻记忆任务（而非基于时间的任务），两个年龄组均表现出积极效应：相较于中性任务，被试完成的积极前瞻记忆任务数量更多，但未观察到消极情绪的增强效应。老年被试的前瞻记忆整体表现较差，但相较于青年被试，其从积极情绪效价中获得的增益更为显著。情绪对前瞻记忆准确性的上述影响似乎并不依赖于任务的回溯记忆成分，因为在对前瞻记忆内容的回忆中，情绪效应呈现出不同的模式。研究结果表明，当需记忆的任务为积极内容时，老年被试的前瞻记忆困难可得到有效缓解。本数据集包含原始数据、实验数据，格式为SPSS文件。