051 Is Working Memory Associated with Ag- related Emotional Memory Bias? Free

Aging is accompanied by deterioration in both working memory (WM) and long-term memory (LTM), though the reason is not well understood. Sleep may play a role in young adults, but the findings in older adults are not as clear. In addition, older adults show better memory for positive memories, whereas youngers tend to hold on to negative memories. The prefrontal cortex has been implicated in this emotional memory bias. The current study investigated the role of working memory (a prefrontal task) on emotional memory consolidation across sleep and wake in young and older adults.

In the morning, 93 younger (18–39) and 121 older (60–85) adults took a WM task and encoded neutral or negative word pairs, and gave valence and arousal ratings for each pair. After a wake or polysomnography-recorded sleep condition, memory for the word pairs was tested plus valence and arousal ratings.

Youngers had better overall memory (p<.001), with older adults showing better memory for neutral compared to negative word pairs (p=.04), as well as increased positivity (p=.02), which was correlated with LTM performance (p=.009). In contrast, youngers performed better on the negative word pairs (p=.01), but no change in ratings and no association between emotional reactivity and LTM. Further, WM was positively related to memory in youngers (r=.38, p=.02), but not in older adults. Lastly, no role for sleep likely due to the lack of an immediate test.

we found that the positivity bias in aging in both memory and valence, with increasing positivity associated with better memory. We found a robust relation between WM and LTM in youngers but not older adults. Our findings are consistent with the socioemotional-selectivity theory that posits that aging is associated with a relative suppression of negative information while WM may play a role.

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