Aging and Emotional Memory: The Role of Social Isolation and Recognition of Negative Emotional Faces

Social isolation and memory problems are among the most common complaints of older adults. The ability to efficiently tend to and identify emotionally relevant information in the environment, like facial expressions, also decreases with age. Being able to tend to and later recall details about emotionally salient information is critical not just for survival but also in developing and maintaining social relationships. Social isolation has important functional consequences for how individuals attend to their social environment and potentially how they store emotionally relevant information for later recall. It remains unclear whether social isolation or facial emotion recognition ability influences emotional memory processes. The current study examined the relation between social isolation and negative emotion recognition ability in 310 population matched adults and memory accuracy for neutral and emotionally salient information. The data was derived from the Cam-CAN study repository (www.cam-can.org). Participants completed a facial emotion recognition and emotional memory task, in addition to self-report measures of mood and social engagement. A social isolation index (SII) score was developed in which higher scores reflected increasing social isolation. Emotion recognition ability (NER) was calculated by participant’s average recognition score for angry and fearful faces. Memory accuracy for positive, negative, and neutral information was based on a d-prime measure of discriminability. A series of hierarchical regressions and factorial ANCOVAs were used to assess the main and interaction effects of age, SII, and NER on memory performance. Though memory declined as a function of increasing age across all valence types, accuracy declined faster for negative relative to positively valenced information. In contrast, higher NER was associated with greater memory accuracy across all valence types. SII did not significantly influence memory accuracy. A significant 3-way interaction was detected such that in socially isolated older adults, greater NER was associated with significantly greater memory accuracy for positively valenced information. Critically, however, the 3-way interaction was observed in a group of n = 8 suggesting the finding is of a spurious nature at best. The present findings suggest parallel processes likely exist between emotion recognition and emotional memory abilities, and they are sensitive to age related changes.