Adults Who Experienced More Positive Emotions Had Less Memory Decline Over The Next Decade

By Emily Reynolds A huge variety of factors are related to memory, from mood to personality to what substances have been consumed. One recent study, for example, found that older adults with higher openness to experience also experienced fewer cognitive complaints each day; other work has found a relationship between self-reported memory and traits including neuroticism and extraversion. Now, in a study published in Psychological Science, Emily F. Hittner from Northwestern University and team have looked at the relationship between memory and positive affect — the experience of pleasant emotional states like enthusiasm, pride or joy. And they found less memory decline over time in those participants with higher levels of positive affect. The team analysed data from 991 participants who had taken part in a longitudinal study of households in the United States. At the first time point, when participants were an average of 55 years old, they had reported  their levels of positive affect using two scales, which asked how often during the last month they had felt enthusiastic, active, peaceful, satisfied and so on. They also completed measures of depression and negative affect, as well as personality trait scales. Participants also took part in a memory assessment. In this test, they were read a list of 15 unrelated words and then had to recall as many as they could immediately (immediate recall) and, in a test they were not warned about, after fifteen minutes ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Memory Source Type: blogs