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Cannabinoid receptor 1 gene (CNR1) variants have been related to affective information processing and, in particular, to stress release. Here, we aimed to examine whether the endocannabinoid system via CNR1 signaling modulates affective working memory, the memory system that transiently maintains and manipulates emotionally charged material. We focused on rs2180619 (A > G) polymorphism and examined genotype data collected from 231 healthy females. Analyses showed how a general positivity bias in working memory (i.e., better memory for positive words) emerged as task strings lengthened only in carriers of the major allele (AA/AG). Differently, GG carriers showed better memory for affective items in general (i.e., positive and negative words). These findings are some of the first to directly highlight the role of variant on promoter of the CNR1 gene in affective working memory and to evidence a differentiation among CNR1 genotypes in terms of larger difficulties in disengaging from negative stimuli in GG carriers.

Activation of medial Prefrontal Cortex (mPFC) has been typically found during reality monitoring tasks (i.e., distinguishing between internal self-generated vs external information). No study, however, has yet investigated whether transcranial Random Noise Stimulation (tRNS) over the mPFC leads to a reduction in reality-monitoring misattributions in aging. In particular, stimulating mPFC should increase the number of cognitive operations engaged while encoding and this distinctive information may help older adults to discriminate between internal and external sources better. In addition, given that older adults are more sensitive to positively-charged information compared to younger adults and that mPFC is typically recruited during encoding of positive stimuli with reference to themselves, activation of mPFC should further sustain source retrieval in older adults. In this double-blind, sham-controlled study, we examined whether tRNS over the mPFC of healthy younger and older adults during encoding enhances subsequent reality monitoring for seen versus imagined emotionally-charged words. Our findings show that tRNS enhances reality monitoring for positively-charged imagined words in the older adult group alone, highlighting the role that mPFC plays in their memory for positive information. In line with the control-based account of positivity effects, our results add evidence about the neurocognitive processes involved in reality monitoring when older adults face emotionally-charged events.

A growing body of evidence suggests that emotional prosody influences the ability to remember verbal information. Although bipolar disorder (BD) has been shown to be associated with deficits in verbal memory and emotional processing, the relation between these processes in this population remains unclear. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the impact of emotional prosody on verbal memory in euthymic BD patients compared with controls. Participants were randomly divided into three subgroups according to different prosody listening conditions (a story read with a positive, negative, or neutral prosody) and effects on a yes-no recognition memory task were investigated. Results showed that euthymic bipolar patients remembered comparable numbers of words after listening to the story with a negative or neutral prosody but remembered fewer words after listening to the positive version compared with healthy controls. Results suggest that verbal memory is hindered in BD patients after listening to the story read with a positive prosody. This recognition bias for information with a positive prosody may lead to negative intrusive verbal memories and poor emotion regulation.

Many studies have found that memory for affective material is better than memory for neutral information and memory for positive material compared to negative material is better in older adults. Behavioral, neurophysiological as well as single polymorphism differences have been advanced to account for these effects. Here, we aimed to examine whether the combination of two polymorphisms (ADRA2B and CB1) in older adults influences active maintenance and manipulation of emotional information in aging working memory. We examined genotype data from 207 older adults (56 double deletion carriers, 116 single deletion carriers and 35 no deletion carriers) who performed a verbal operation span-like task with positive, negative and neutral words. We found that subjects carrying both ADRA2B and CB1 variants generally remembered a higher number of words. In addition, double carriers showed positivity effects while single carriers showed more general emotional enhancement effects, especially as strings lengthened. These findings are amongst the first to suggest a haplotype account of positivity effects in older adults’ memory.

Interest in the role of the noradrenergic system in the modulation of emotional memories has recently increased. This study briefly reviews this timely line of research with a specific focus on aging. After having identified surprisingly few studies that investigated emotional memory in older adults from a neurobiological perspective, we found a significant interaction between noradrenergic activity and emotional memory enhancement in older adults. This pattern of data are explained both in terms of a top-down modulation of behavioral processes (e.g., changes in priority and individual goals) and in terms of greater activity of noradrenergic system during aging. Altogether, both behavioral and genetic variations studies (e.g., Alpha 2 B Adrenoceptor genotype) have shown that healthy older adults are able to circumvent or minimize the experience of negative emotions and stabilize or even enhance positive emotional experiences. Future studies are highly warranted to better clarify the relationship between noradrenaline and emotional memories in the aging brain. © 2016 Elsevier B.V.

Emotional face recognition is impaired in bipolar disorder, but it is not clear whether this is specific for the illness. Here, we investigated how aging and bipolar disorder influence dynamic emotional face recognition. Twenty older adults, 16 bipolar patients, and 20 control subjects performed a dynamic affective facial recognition task and a subsequent rating task. Participants pressed a key as soon as they were able to discriminate whether the neutral face was assuming a happy or angry facial expression and then rated the intensity of each facial expression. Results showed that older adults recognized happy expressions faster, whereas bipolar patients recognized angry expressions faster. Furthermore, both groups rated emotional faces more intensely than did the control subjects. This study is one of the first to compare how aging and clinical conditions influence emotional facial recognition and underlines the need to consider the role of specific and common factors in emotional face recognition.

Difficulties in source monitoring (SM) tasks observed in healthy older adults may be linked to associative memory deficits since SM requires individuals to correctly bind and later remember these bound features to discriminate the origin of a memory. Therefore, focusing attention on discriminating factors that may attenuate older adults' difficulties in attributing contextual information to memories is necessary. We investigated the effect of affective information on source monitoring in younger and older adults by manipulating the type of affective information (pictures and music) and assessing the ability to remember spatial and temporal source details for affective pictures encoded while listening to classical music. Older and younger adults viewed a series of affective IAPS pictures presented on the left or right side of the computer screen in two different lists. At test, participants were asked to remember if the picture was seen (right/left), in which list (list1/list2) or whether it was new. Results showed that spatial information was attributed better than temporal information and emotional pictures were attributed better than neutral pictures in both younger and older adults. In addition, although music significantly increased source memory performance in both younger and older participants compared to the white noise condition, the pleasantness of music differentially affected memory for source details. The authors discuss findings in terms of an interaction between music, emotion and cognition in aging.

False memories are common memory distortions in everyday life and seem to increase with affectively connoted complex information. In line with recent studies showing a significant interaction between the noradrenergic system and emotional memory, we investigated whether healthy volunteer carriers of the deletion variant of the ADRA2B gene that codes for the α2b-adrenergic receptor are more prone to false memories than non-carriers. In this study, we collected genotype data from 212 healthy female volunteers; 91 ADRA2B carriers and 121 non-carriers. To assess gene effects on false memories for affective information, factorial mixed model analysis of variances (ANOVAs) were conducted with genotype as the between-subjects factor and type of memory error as the within-subjects factor. We found that although carriers and non-carriers made comparable numbers of false memory errors, they showed differences in the direction of valence biases, especially for inferential causal errors. Specifically, carriers produced fewer causal false memory errors for scripts with a negative outcome, whereas non-carriers showed a more general emotional effect and made fewer causal errors with both positive and negative outcomes. These findings suggest that putatively higher levels of noradrenaline in deletion carriers may enhance short-term consolidation of negative information and lead to fewer memory distortions when facing negative events.

In line with the dimensional theory of emotional space, we developed affective norms for words rated in terms of valence, arousal and dominance in a group of older adults to complete the adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for Italian and to aid research on aging. Here, as in the original Italian ANEW database, participants evaluated valence, arousal, and dominance by means of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in a paper-and-pencil procedure. We observed high split-half reliabilities within the older sample and high correlations with the affective ratings of previous research, especially for valence, suggesting that there is large agreement among older adults within and across-languages. More importantly, we found high correlations between younger and older adults, showing that our data are generalizable across different ages. However, despite this across-ages accord, we obtained age-related differences on three affective dimensions for a great number of words. In particular, older adults rated as more arousing and more unpleasant a number of words that younger adults rated as moderately unpleasant and arousing in our previous affective norms. Moreover, older participants rated negative stimuli as more arousing and positive stimuli as less arousing than younger participants, thus leading to a less-curved distribution of ratings in the valence by arousal space. We also found more extreme ratings for older adults for the relationship between dominance and arousal: older adults gave lower dominance and higher arousal ratings for words rated by younger adults with middle dominance and arousal values. Together, these results suggest that our affective norms are reliable and can be confidently used to select words matched for the affective dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance across younger and older participants for future research in aging.

This study examined the production of inferential false memories for complex pictorial stimuli and the implications of affective content in Alzheimer's disease (AD). A group of 24 AD patients and a group of 24 healthy older adults studied a sequence of pictures depicting stories that included positive, negative or neutral consequences of an unseen action, and then completed an old-new picture recognition test. The number of causal errors was higher in healthy older adults compared to AD patients but affective content attenuated the effect. Causal errors increased in AD patients when stories included affective (positive or negative) outcomes. In addition, negative content produced a larger number of errors than positive content across groups. This data confirms that although memory processing is poorer in AD, it is sensitive to affective content. Accordingly, the nature of affective false memory errors suggest the need to consider the use of affective information in the development of new cognitive training procedures.

Studies have shown a direct link between memory for emotionally salient experiences and false memories. In particular, emotionally arousing material of negative and positive valence enhanced reality monitoring compared to neutral material since emotional stimuli can be encoded with more contextual details and thereby facilitate the distinction between presented and imagined stimuli. Individuals with schizophrenia appear to be impaired in both reality monitoring and memory for emotional experiences. However, the relationship between the emotionality of the-to-be-remembered material and false memory occurrence has not yet been studied. In this study, twenty-four patients and twenty-four healthy adults completed a false memory task with everyday episodes composed of 12 photographs that depicted positive, negative or neutral outcomes. Results showed how patients with schizophrenia made a higher number of false memories than normal controls (p0.05) resulting from erroneous inferences but did interact with plausible, script consistent errors in patients (i.e. neutral episodes yielded a higher degree of errors than positive and negative episodes. Affective information reduces the probability of generating causal errors in healthy adults but not in patients suggesting that emotional memory impairments may contribute to deficits in reality monitoring in schizophrenia when affective information is involved.

According to the feature-based model of semantic memory, concepts are described by a set of semantic features that contribute, with different weights, to the meaning of a concept. Interestingly, this theoretical framework has introduced numerous dimensions to describe semantic features. Recently, we proposed a new parameter to measure the importance of a semantic feature for the conceptual representation-that is, semantic significance. Here, with speeded verification tasks, we tested the predictive value of our index and investigated the relative roles of conceptual and featural dimensions on the participants' performance. The results showed that semantic significance is a good predictor of participants' verification latencies and suggested that it efficiently captures the salience of a feature for the computation of the meaning of a given concept. Therefore, we suggest that semantic significance can be considered an effective index of the importance of a feature in a given conceptual representation. Moreover, we propose that it may have straightforward implications for feature-based models of semantic memory, as an important additional factor for understanding conceptual representation.

Objectives: Working memory functions and their relations with affective auditory factors, have not been extensively investigated in aging yet. Method: In this study, younger and older participants completed a classical working memory test (a running working memory task) pronounced by three different voices. In particular, in Experiment 1 the natural voices of a 3-year-old child, a 26-year-old young adult and an 86-year-old older adult were used for task presentation. In Experiment 2 stimuli were morphed in order to better control for sound properties across the three voices. Results: Results showed that working memory increased for older adults compared to younger adults when the task was presented with natural voices and especially so when the task was presented in a child's voice. However, the child-voice effect disappeared with morphed voices. Conclusion: Data confirm the importance of studying the relationship between auditory features and emotional variations as a possible practical means of reducing typical age-related working memory deficits.

Human memory is an imperfect process, prone to distortion and errors that range from minor disturbances to major errors that can have serious consequences on everyday life. In this study, we investigated false remembering of manipulatory verbs using an explicit recognition task and pupillometry. Our results replicated the "classical" pupil old/new effect as well as data in false remembering literature that show how items must be recognize as old in order for the pupil size to increase (e.g., "subjective" pupil old/new effect), even though these items do not necessarily have to be truly old. These findings support the strength-of-memory trace account that affirms that pupil dilation is related to experience rather than to the accuracy of recognition. Moreover, behavioral results showed higher rates of true and false recognitions for manipulatory verbs and a consequent larger pupil diameter, supporting the embodied view of language.© 2013 Elsevier B.V.

Two experiments examined the effects of spatial and temporal contiguities in a working memory binding task that required participants to remember coloured objects. In Experiment 1, a black and white drawing and a corresponding phrase that indicated its colour perceptually were either near or far (spatial study condition), while in Experiment 2, the colour phrase and the black and white drawing were presented either simultaneously or sequentially (temporal study condition). Results showed that the absence of contiguity negatively affected binding performance. Data is discussed in line with theoretical and multimedia models of integrative processes in working memory.

Better memory for positive information compared to negative and neutral information has been repeatedly associated with successful aging. The main psychological explanations for this so-called “positivity effect” in memory principally rely on emotional, motivational, and cognitive mechanisms that make older adults' cognition highly sensitive to positive information according to ultimate goals of well-being. However, emerging evidence also delineates a genetic profile for positivity effects in memory, which may render some older adults more prone than others to encoding and remembering positive memories. First, we present a brief overview of behavioral and neuroimaging studies about the positivity effect in aging. Subsequently, we report studies on candidate genes associated with positive memories. In particular, we review work to date on several candidate genes that are sensitive to stimulus valence such as ADRA2B, COMT, and 5HTTLPR. Finally, we propose that the future approach to the study of genetic correlates of positivity effects in memory should also include mitochondrial functioning (TOMM40). Altogether, the study of genetics and cell biology of positivity effects in memory can help us to reveal the underlying bottom-up pathways to positive affect in healthy aging.

Lack of motivation, or apathy, is a clinically significant feature among dementia patients. The current study aimed to assess the effectiveness of a brief emotional shaping intervention developed to reduce apathy and increase willingness-to-do in Alzheimer's Dementia patients. To this end, 26 Alzheimer patients diagnosed with apathy according to the Apathy Evaluation Scale (AES, Marin et al.,1991) and 26 healthy older controls performed an emotional shaping task intended to unconsciously foster willingness-to-do. Participants were randomly assigned to either a positive or a neutral conditioning situation. Results showed how the positively conditioned group was associated with improved willingness-to-do in both patients and controls compared to the neutrally conditioned group. Our findings suggest that unconscious emotional processing can be used to treat apathy symptoms and increase willingness-to-do in Alzheimer's Dementia. © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd.

Prosody, or the way things are said, can modify the meaning of utterances making qualitatively different affective prosodies useful for understanding how auditory affective information is processed and remembered. In this study, we collected behavioral data from 225 younger (M age = 20.8 years, SD = 2.5 years; 119 males) and 225 older adults (M age = 71.6 years, SD = 6.5 years; 119 males) in order to examine age differences in emotional prosody effects on verbal memory. Participants were randomly divided into three subgroups according to different prosody listening conditions (positive, negative, and neutral) and prosody effects on a yes-no recognition memory task were investigated. The results showed how older adults who listened to the story read with a neutral prosody remembered more words than those who listened to the same story with a positive or negative prosody. Younger adults showed no valence effects. Our findings highlighted an age and affective prosody interaction that affects remembering in older adults alone.

Numerous studies have reported age-related differences in memory for emotional information. One explanation places emphasis on an emotion processing preference in older adults that reflects their socioemotional self-relevant goals. Here, we evaluate the degree to which this preference in memory may be modulated by color. In 2 experiments, younger and older adults were asked to study a series of affective words (Experiment 1) or affective pictures (Experiment 2) and then presented with an immediate yes/no memory recognition task. In particular, words and pictures were colored according to the following valence-color associations: positive-green, negative-red, and neutral-blue. Each study condition included both congruent (e.g., positive-green) and incongruent associations (e.g., positive-red). For both experiments, participants showed an advantage for congruent associations compared with other types of valence-color pairings that emphasized a robust joint effect of color and affective valence in memory. More specifically, older adults' memory was sensitive to positive-green stimuli only. We discussed results in line with mechanisms underlying positivity effects in memory and the effect of color on emotional memory encoding. (PsycINFO Database Record

Inductive learning requires abstracting concepts and categories from examples, that is, learning to generalize examples. The paper by Kornell et al. (2010) examined the influence of spacing or distributed practice on inductive learning in a group of younger and older adults. Their study involved a total of 112 participants, 64 younger adults (55% women, mean age 21) and 48 older adults (56% women, mean age 77). These two groups of participants were asked to learn the styles of 12 different artists. A given artist's paintings were displayed either massed or spaced (that is, interleaved among paintings by the other artists) during study but no painting was ever repeated during study or at test. Spacing was manipulated within participants. After the learning phase, participants were shown paintings by the 12 artists and asked to select the artist who had painted each painting from a list of the artists' names. Results show that inductive learning was better following a spaced presentation rather than a massed presentation and that this finding was independent of age. Kornell et al. (2010) argue that spacing effectively promoted inductive learning in aging since older adults were able to maintain conceptual memories of a painter's style and consequently form and maintain the sort of gist-based memories that support concept learning via spaced practice. The nature of the materials allowed older adults to engage in encoding processes that support schema abstraction. Although, this hypothesis is in line with the numerous account of spacing effects in memory, age-related effects could also be explained in terms older adults' disproportionate focus on emotional information relative to non-emotional information and, specifically, on positive rather than negative or neutral information (Di Domenico et al., 2015; Fairfield et al., 2015a,b). Indeed, Mikels et al. (2005) examined age differences in performance on a working memory task in which participants were required to maintain a representation of emotional intensity while they made judgments about pairs of images. Results showed that age-related differences disappeared during the working memory maintenance task in which the to-be-remembered information was emotional. In fact, older adults were able to maintain the emotional intensity and valence of a picture while comparing it to a new picture, especially when dealing with positive pictures. Regardless of the underlying mechanisms, these findings highlight the importance of emotion—cognition interactions in various domains (Mammarella et al., 2012a,b, 2013; Fairfield et al., 2013; Di Domenico et al., 2014). In fact, inductive learning also requires the maintenance of multiple types of mental representations in working memory, including the emotional valence and intensity of a stimulus or event. It is possible the similar dynamics are going on in Kornell et al.'s (2010) study for two reasons. First, Mammarella et al. (2014) found that it is possible to obtain spacing effects with emotional material, extending the classical learning benefit from spaced practice to emotional learning contexts. Second, viewing a painting usually triggers an emotional response to it. The material used by Kornell et al. (2010) contain landscapes or skyscapes painted by relatively unknown artists. Arguably, when individuals view a painting for the first time they typically assign an emotional connotation to it (I like it/I do not like it) and this may create an efficient basis for inductive learning, especially for older adults. Many pictures from the International Affective Picture System (Lang et al., 2008) which include landscapes or skyscapes are rated as being more positive than other types of content. In Kornell et al.'s (2010) study, older participants may have aided their learning of a painter's style by associating an emotional response to it. However, since the material used in the Kornell et al. (2010)'s study was not previously rated by another independent group of older adults in terms of valence, we cannot exclude this hypothesis. In fact, inductive learning in older adults may have benefited from spaced practice because older adults maintained and compared interleaved paintings by the same painter in terms of the associated valence, intensity or, more in general, emotional connotation. Another relevant aspect of the study is the fact that following the test phase, participants were asked which type of practice (massive or spaced) helped them learn more. Both younger and older adults expressed a preference for massed practice compared to spaced practice, and this was particularly strong in the older adults: 75% judged massed practice to be more helpful, only 4% thought spacing was superior, and 21% stated that it was about the same. Importantly, these metacognitive data highlighted the illusion that consecutive processing linked to positive emotions (e.g., Berridge and Winkielman, 2003) makes learning easier. In massed presentations, paintings by the same artist were presented consecutively. Participants, and especially older adults, considered it as the best way to abstract the painter's style. These data indicate that the immediate perception of fluency (e.g., the perception of the ease with which the stimulus is processed) generates positive emotions. Consequently, the well-established preference of older adults toward positive emotions reflected in the higher number of massed compared to spaced or other types of responses. In sum, while Kornell et al. (2010)'s data strongly focus on classical explanations for spacing effects and induction, an interpretation favoring a strong interaction between cognition and emotion cannot be ignored and is highly relevant for directing future research in the area of inductive learning, especially in the aging mind.

Previous studies found that the ADRA2B gene modulates early perception and attention. Here, we aimed to examine whether ADRA2B polymorphisms also influence emotional working memory and the willingness to implement behaviors (switching affective intonation) in order to avoid negative information, both considered indexes of cognitive-affective flexibility. We examined genotype data collected from 212 healthy females, 91 ADRA2B carriers and 121 non-carriers, and found that carriers showed a positivity bias in working memory. That is, carriers remembered a higher number of positive words compared to negative and neutral words. In addition, although carriers were more unwilling to switch intonation in order to avoid negative information, they showed better recognition memory for words read with a positive intonation. These findings suggest that deletion variants of ADRA2B may show greater levels of cognitive-affective flexibility compared to non-carriers.

In this study, we investigated whether age-related differences in emotion regulation priorities influence online dynamic emotional facial discrimination. A group of 40 younger and a group of 40 older adults were invited to recognize a positive or negative expression as soon as the expression slowly emerged and subsequently rate it in terms of intensity. Our findings show that older adults recognized happy expressions faster than angry ones, while the direction of emotional expression does not seem to affect younger adults’ performance. Furthermore, older adults rated both negative and positive emotional faces as more intense compared to younger controls. This study detects age-related differences with a dynamic online paradigm and suggests that different regulation strategies may shape emotional face recognition.

Emotional meta-memory can be defined as the knowledge people have about the strategies and monitoring processes that they can use to remember their emotionally charged memories. Although meta-memory per se has been studied in many cognitive laboratories for many years, fewer studies have explicitly focused on meta-memory for emotionally charged or valenced information. In this brief review, we analyzed a series of behavioral and neuroimaging studies that used different meta-memory tasks with valenced information in order to foster new research in this direction, especially in terms of commonalities/peculiarities of the emotion and meta-memory interaction. In addition, results further support meta-cognitive models that take emotional factors into account when defining meta-memory per se.

The influence of motivated behaviors linked to achievement goal pursuit on age-related differences in working memory (WM) has not been extensively investigated. In this study, younger and older participants completed a classical 2-back working memory task that included different types of goal-relevant stimuli. In particular, in Experiment 1 we used euro banknotes as stimuli, whereas in Experiment 2 we used Neapolitan playing cards. In Experiment 3, we directly compared working memory performance for euros and Neapolitan playing cards. We chose stimuli to induce different motivated behaviors linked to the pursuit of achievement goals (e.g., mastery, self-referential vs. performance, normative-based) and to examine their effects on working memory performance. Results showed how older adults were able to recognize target stimuli as well as younger adults when stimuli were goal-relevant. However, Neapolitan playing cards produced a greater number of errors, especially in the older adults. Finally, in Experiment 4, the same pattern of results occurred when motivated behavior was promoted using a dispositional induction technique. Our results show that motivated behaviors evoked by qualitatively diverse achievement goals can modulate WM performance in aging.

Memory for repeated items improves when presentations are spaced during study. Here, two experiments assessed the so-called spacing effect on a yes–no recognition memory task using affective and neutral words. In Experiment 1, a group of participants was asked to orient their attention to semantic features of target words (deep semantic analysis) that were consecutively repeated or spaced, while another group was engaged in a graphemic shallow analysis of words (Experiment 2). The depth of word processing approach was meant to highlight the role of repetition priming mechanisms in the generation of spacing effects. We found that spacing effects occurred for both affective and neutral words (Experiment 1). However, following shallow analysis of words, the spacing effect was reduced for both affective and neutral words (Experiment 2). No differences were detected in terms of positive versus negative words. These results suggest that spaced learning operates when the to-be-remembered material is also affectively charged and that, under certain circumstances, it may enhance recognition memory as affective connotation does.

Previous studies have shown that higher levels of self-esteem are associated with better academic performance. However, there is no evidence if make-up can indirectly influence academic achievement and cognition through self-esteem. In this study, we examined the possibility that make-up can affect academic performance by asking 186 female undergraduate students to take a simulated university examination. Participants were randomly assigned to three groups, which consisted of wearing make-up, listening to positive music, and face coloring. Results showed that female students who had put make-up on received higher grades compared to those who did not. In addition, these students outperformed students with positive mood only and students who were engaged in a control activity. These findings underline the necessity of adopting a multidimensional approach to learning and memory and attest to the importance of studying further the interaction between physical self-esteem and cosmetics in cognition.

We developed affective norms for 1,121 Italian words in order to provide researchers with a highly controlled tool for the study of verbal processing. This database was developed from translations of the 1,034 English words present in the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999) and from words taken from Italian semantic norms (Montefinese, Ambrosini, Fairfield, & Mammarella, Behavior Research Methods, 45, 440–461, 2013). Participants evaluated valence, arousal, and dominance using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in a Web survey procedure. Participants also provided evaluations of three subjective psycholinguistic indexes (familiarity, imageability, and concreteness), and five objective psycholinguistic indexes (e.g., word frequency) were also included in the resulting database in order to further characterize the Italian words. We obtained a typical quadratic relation between valence and arousal, in line with previous findings. We also tested the reliability of the present ANEW adaptation for Italian by comparing it to previous affective databases and performing split-half correlations for each variable. We found high split-half correlations within our sample and high correlations between our ratings and those of previous studies, confirming the validity of the adaptation of ANEW for Italian. This database of affective norms provides a tool for future research about the effects of emotion on human cognition.

Trying to remember something now typically improves your ability to remember it later. However, after watching a video of a simulated bank robbery, participants who verbally described the robber were 25% worse at identifying the robber in a lineup than were participants who instead listed U.S. states and capitals—this has been termed the “verbal overshadowing” effect (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990). More recent studies suggested that this effect might be substantially smaller than first reported. Given uncertainty about the effect size, the influence of this finding in the memory literature, and its practical importance for police procedures, we conducted two collections of preregistered direct replications (RRR1 and RRR2) that differed only in the order of the description task and a filler task. In RRR1, when the description task immediately followed the robbery, participants who provided a description were 4% less likely to select the robber than were those in the control condition. In RRR2, when the description was delayed by 20 min, they were 16% less likely to select the robber. These findings reveal a robust verbal overshadowing effect that is strongly influenced by the relative timing of the tasks. The discussion considers further implications of these replications for our understanding of verbal overshadowing.

The authors compared 18 centenarians' (M age = 100.1years, SD = 1.8years) recognition memory for emotional (positive, negative, and religious) pictures with 18 older adults (M age = 75.2years, SD = 6.8years). Participants observed a series of images that varied in emotional valence and meaning and were later asked to discriminate between old and new images in a series of pictures that included studied images as well as new images. Centenarians showed decreased recognition memory for positive and negative images items compared with older adults, F(1, 34) = 9.82, p

In this study we investigated central and peripheral feature binding in a group of 24 high pre-morbid IQ patients with schizophrenia and 24 healthy controls. In particular, participants were asked to remember specific single (e.g., word, colour) or multiple features (e.g., coloured words) of experimental items with central (coloured word) vs. peripheral (a coloured frame) attributes in a working memory binding task. Performance of the patients was significantly inferior to that of controls, especially when required to remember the peripheral combination of multiple features. Results suggest that patients with schizophrenia may have difficulties in unitizing peripheral features in working memory.

The aim of the present study was to examine age-related differences between young, young–old and old–old adults in an affective version of the classical Working Memory Operation Span Test. The affective version of the Working Memory Operation Span Test included neutral words (as in the classical version) as well as negative and positive ones. Results showed that while young adults performed better than the young–old and old–old with neutral words, age-related differences between young and young–old with positive words were no longer significant, and age-related differences were nullified with negative ones. Altogether, results indicate that emotional words can reduce age-related decline when maintenance and manipulation of information in working memory in older adults are required.

Background: Source monitoring (SM) refers to our ability to discriminate between memories from different sources.Methods: Twenty healthy high-cognitive functioning older adults, 20 healthy low-cognitive functioning older adults, and 20 older adults with dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT) were asked to perform a series of SM tasks that varied in terms of the to-be-remembered source attribute (perceptual, spatial, temporal, semantic, social, and affective details).Results: Results indicated that older DAT adults had greater difficulty in SM compared to the healthy control groups, especially with spatial and semantic details.Conclusions: Data are discussed in terms of the SM framework and suggest that poor memory for some types of source information may be considered as an important indicator of clinical memory function when assessing for the presence and severity of dementia.

Data showing how schizophrenia patients tend to be more susceptible to false memories have been rather mixed and, as far as we know, no studies have investigated whether patients with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder are particularly prone to imagination inflation effects, that is, whether repeatedly imagining an action increases the likelihood of remembering the action as having been performed. In this study, a group of patients with psychosis and a group of normal controls were asked to perform or to imagine performing simple action statements one or four times in a single study session. In a test session that occurred 24 h later, participants were instructed to discriminate whether the action statement had been carried out, imagined or whether it was new (a source monitoring task). The primary finding was that patients were more susceptible to source-monitoring errors than controls, especially in terms of considering an imagined action as having been performed. However, both groups showed comparable levels of imagination inflation effects. Results add evidence to the hypothesis that the nature of patients' false memories may be particularly linked to poor use of source-monitoring processes.

The present study investigated emotional memory following bilateral transcranial electrical stimulation (direct current of 1 mA, for 20 minutes) over fronto-temporal cortical areas of healthy participants during the encoding of images that differed in affective arousal and valence. The main result was a significant interaction between the side of anodal stimulation and image emotional valence. Specifically, right anodal/left cathodal stimulation selectively facilitated the recall of pleasant images with respect to both unpleasant and neutral images whereas left anodal/right cathodal stimulation selectively facilitated the recall of unpleasant images with respect to both pleasant and neutral images. From a theoretical perspective, this double dissociation between the side of anodal stimulation and the advantage in the memory performance for a specific type of stimulus depending on its pleasantness supported the specific-valence hypothesis of emotional processes, which assumes a specialization of the right hemisphere in processing unpleasant stimuli and a specialization of the left hemisphere in processing pleasant stimuli. From a methodological point of view, first we found tDCS effects strictly dependent on the stimulus category, and second a pattern of results in line with an interfering and inhibitory account of anodal stimulation on memory performance. These findings need to be carefully considered in applied contexts, such as the rehabilitation of altered emotional processing or eye-witness memory, and deserve to be further investigated in order to understand their underlying mechanisms of action.

The authors examined the role of cognitive operations in discriminations between externally and internally generated events (e.g., reality monitoring) in healthy and pathological aging. The authors used 2 reality-monitoring distinctions to manipulate the quantity and quality of necessary cognitive operations: discriminating between I performed versus I imagined performing and between I watched another perform versus I imagined another performing. Older adults had more difficulty than did younger adults when discriminating between memories in both versions of the task. In addition, older adults with Alzheimer's-type dementia showed marked difficulties when attributing a source to imagined actions. The authors interpret these findings in terms of an age difficulty or the failure to use cognitive operations as useful cues during source monitoring.

In three experiments, participants were asked to perform simple action statements or to imagine performing the actions in a single study session. In a test session that occurred 1 hr, 24 hr, 48 hr (Experiments 1a and 1b), or 1 week later (Experiments 2 and 3), participants were instructed to tell whether the action statement had been carried out or imagined. The primary finding was that, overall, recognition and reality monitoring showed a comparable rate of forgetting. The results add evidence to the hypothesis that, also after long retention delays, discrimination between an internal and an external source may not be inferior to item recognition. A new theoretical proposal to account for these findings is outlined.

Reality monitoring refers to the discrimination between memories of internal and external events (e.g., Johnson & Raye, 1981). A total of 28 healthy older adults and 28 older adults with Alzheimer's type dementia (DAT) were asked to perform or to imagine performing simple action statements in a running memory test. This task required participants to tell whether the action statement had been carried out or imagined, or whether it was new at unpredictable intervals. The results indicated that older adults with DAT had greater difficulty in reality monitoring than did the healthy control group. The finding is discussed in terms of the role of working memory functions in reality monitoring.

Background and aims: Controversial evidence suggests that music can enhance cognitive performance. In the present study, we examined whether listening to an excerpt of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" had a positive effect on older adults' cognitive performance in two working memory tasks. Methods: With a repeated-measures design, older adults were presented with the forward version of the digit span and phonemic fluency in classical music, white-noise and no-music conditions. Results: Classical music significantly increased working memory performance compared with the no-music condition. In addition, this effect did not occur with white noise. Conclusion: The authors discuss this finding in terms of the arousal-and-mood hypothesis and the role of working memory resources in aging. © 2007, Editrice Kurtis.

Background and aims: This study examined whether remembering location information relies on efficient inhibitory functions. Methods: In two experiments, younger and older adults performed an active visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM) span task. Participants were presented with a series of locations and asked to remember only final target locations, which were manipulated according to source (e.g., indicated by the experimenter or participant). Results: Data showed that, as the complexity of the VSWM task increased, older adults made more intrusion errors than younger adults, and that, older adults especially seemed to have difficulty in recalling correct locations when non-final locations were directly manipulated. Conclusions: This study highlights how older adults' performance in VSWM is influenced by inhibitory working memory functions, which become particularly crucial as attentional demands grow.