Examining the relationship between social and cognitive aging: Can working memory abilities and attention to emotional faces be increased in older adults during multimodal language processing

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST; Carstensen, 1987, 1992, 1994) asserts that when limits on time left in life are perceived, present-oriented goals related to emotional meaning are prioritized over future-oriented goals. Motivational changes occur as chronological age increases. Those motivations systematically influence social preferences, social network composition, self-definition, and emotion regulation, for example. In older age, when time left in life has a limit, people tend to surround themselves with positive others that enable positive experiences and emotions. Arguably, this has implications for the way older adults process emotional behaviors in others. Connections between SST and cognition, physiology, and language processing during face-to-face communications are drawn in this paper. Two experiments were done that investigates the relationship between working memory, and emotional and SST. The theoretical framework stems from both social and cognitive psychology. Experiment 1 examined whether the addition of new individuals in the peripheral network (Carstensen, 1987) would have an effect on working memory abilities. Participants completed a mnemonic memory task (Method of Loci) and worked either singularly or in tetrads. Experiment 2 examined the relationship between negative emotions and age. Primarily, Experiment 2 attempted to reverse the "positivity effect" fouled by Mather and Carstensen (2005) by systematically increasing the amount of exposure of negative emotions. A theoretical rational will be presented that explains the results and their empirical impact in the cognitive aging literature.