The Role of Schematic Support and Emotional Valence in Associative Memory in Young and Older Adults

The purpose of this study was to investigate the combined effect of positive facial expressions and prior knowledge on the associative memory of young and older adults. When asked to remember the association between paired items (i.e., associative memory), older adults tend to perform significantly worse than young adults. However, older adults’ associative memory performance can be ameliorated by high levels of schematic support from previous knowledge. Additionally, older adults tend to show a bias in attention and memory towards positive information, a phenomenon named the positivity effect. However, there is a gap in the literature about whether valence, such as the emotional expression of facial stimuli, will interact with or moderate the beneficial effect of schematic support on older adults’ associative memory. The current study aimed to examine this question by testing young and older adults on their memory for low schematic name-face and high schematic occupation-face associations of difference valences (happy vs. angry emotional facial expression). Associative memory performance was indexed by recognition discrimination (i.e., Hit rate-False alarm rate). This study found that occupations were significantly better recognized than names, for both happy and angry pairs. However, the valence effect was present only for occupation-face pairs, with a better recognition for positive pairs, in both age groups. The findings suggest that schematic support is an effective associative memory booster strategy that facilitates the valence memory advantage for positive over negative pairs.