McAlester Hall, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri 65211, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2012 May;40(4):551-66. doi: 10.3758/s13421-011-0169-x.
In this study we assessed the potential moderating roles of stimulus type (emotionally arousing) and participants' characteristics (gender) in older adults' associative memory deficit. In two experiments, young and older participants studied lists that included neutral and emotionally arousing word pairs (positive and negative) and completed recognition tests for the words and their associations. In Experiment 1, the majority of the word pairs were composed of two nouns, whereas in Experiment 2 they were composed of adjective-noun pairs. The results extend evidence for older adults' associative deficit and suggest that older and younger adults' item memory is improved for emotionally arousing words. However, associative memory for the word pairs did not benefit (and even showed a slight decline) from emotionally arousing words, which was the case for both younger and older adults. In addition, in these experiments, gender appeared to moderate the associative deficit of older adults, with older males but not females demonstrating this deficit.
在这项研究中，我们评估了刺激类型（情绪唤醒）和参与者特征（性别）在老年人联想记忆缺陷中的潜在调节作用。在两项实验中，年轻和年长的参与者学习了包含中性和情绪唤醒的单词对（积极和消极）的列表，并完成了对单词及其联想的识别测试。在实验 1 中，大多数单词对由两个名词组成，而在实验 2 中，它们由形容词-名词对组成。研究结果扩展了老年人联想缺陷的证据，并表明情绪唤醒的单词可以提高年轻和年长参与者的项目记忆。然而，对于单词对的联想记忆并没有从情绪唤醒的单词中受益（甚至略有下降），这在年轻和年长的参与者中都是如此。此外，在这些实验中，性别似乎调节了老年人大脑的联想缺陷，只有老年男性而不是女性表现出这种缺陷。
