Katsuhara, M. 1 , Osaka, M. 2 & Osaka, N. 1
1 Kyoto University
2 Osaka University
In previous studies, younger adults demonstrated an affective bias for negative context, and an impairment of memory for neutral target words simultaneously-presented (Rabinowitz & Carlson, 2010). Though older adults seem to be even more susceptible to the influence of negative and highly arousing stimuli, it remains unclear whether this affective bias would also occur in negative and low arousal context (Mather & Knight, 2005). We explored the effect of negative, low arousal context using three different reading span tasks (RST): positive-context, negative-context, and control (neutral-context) conditions. In the positive-context condition, the sentences had positive content, whereas the negative-context condition sentences had negative content. We selected sentences that had low arousal levels to remove the effect of automatic processing and attention. Additionally, target words had a relatively neutral content. In each RST, participants were asked to read sentences and targeted words aloud, while memorizing the targeted words. The results suggest that there was no affective bias for negative or low arousal context in older adults. In younger adults, recall accuracy was worse when the sentences proceeding target words had negative valence as opposed to positive. However, in older adults, there was no performance difference between negative and positive conditions.