ArticleFrontiers in psychology2017
When Emotions Matter: Focusing on Emotion Improves Working Memory Updating in Older Adults.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- Does artificiality matter? Comparing working memory performance for artificial and real faces.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Emotional Modulation of Working Memory in Older Adults: Dissociable Contributions of Cognitive Reserve and Emotional Intelligence.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Linking Psychophysiological Markers To Situational Performance: An EEG Study of Police Cadets during Critical Incident Simulations.Applied psychophysiology and biofeedback · 2026Article
- Motivation and emotional distraction interact and affect executive functions.BMC psychology · 2024Article
- The assessment of executive function abilities in healthy and neurodegenerative aging-A selective literature review.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2024Review
- Posttraumatic stress, visual working memory, and visual imagery in military personnel.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2023Article
- The effect of negative emotion processing on spatial navigation: an experimental study using virtual reality.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Aging and distractor resistance in working memory: Does emotional valence matter?BMC psychology · 2022Article
- Electrophysiological Studies of Cognitive Reappraisal Success and Failure in aMCI.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Memory updating through aging: different patterns for socially meaningful (and not) stimuli.Aging clinical and experimental research · 2021Article
- Threatening Facial Expressions Impact Goal-Directed Actions Only if Task-Relevant.Brain sciences · 2020Article
- Delayed reconfiguration of a non-emotional task set through reactivation of an emotional task set in task switching: an ageing study.Cognition & emotion · 2019Article
- Preserved Proactive Control in Ageing: A Stroop Study With Emotional Faces vs. Words.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Differential effects of angry faces on working memory updating in younger and older adults.Psychology and aging · 2018Article
- Emotion Processing Dysfunction in Alzheimer's Disease: An Overview of Behavioral Findings, Systems Neural Correlates, and Underlying Neural Biology.American journal of Alzheimer's disease and other dementiasReview
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Research indicates that emotion can affect the ability to monitor and replace content in working memory, an executive function that is usually referred to as updating. However, it is less clear if the effects of emotion on updating vary with its relevance for the task and with age. Here, 25 younger (20-34 years of age) and 25 older adults (63-80 years of age) performed a 1-back and a 2-back task, in which they responded to younger, middle-aged, and older faces showing neutral, happy or angry expressions. The relevance of emotion for the task was manipulated through instructions to make match/non-match judgments based on the emotion (i.e., emotion was task-relevant) or the age (i.e., emotion was task-irrelevant) of the face. It was found that only older adults updated emotional faces more readily compared to neutral faces as evidenced by faster RTs on non-match trials. This emotion benefit was observed under low-load conditions (1-back task) but not under high-load conditions (2-back task) and only if emotion was task-relevant. In contrast, task-irrelevant emotion did not impair updating performance in either age group. These findings suggest that older adults can benefit from task-relevant emotional information to a greater extent than younger adults when sufficient cognitive resources are available. They also highlight that emotional processing can buffer age-related decline in WM tasks that require not only maintenance but also manipulation of material.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.