The influence of emotional narrative content on the self-reference effect in memory

Nishaat Mukadam; Wanbing Zhang; Xiaodong Liu; Andrew E Budson; Angela Gutchess

doi:10.1016/j.nbas.2021.100015

The influence of emotional narrative content on the self-reference effect in memory

Aging Brain. 2021 May 24:1:100015. doi: 10.1016/j.nbas.2021.100015. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Nishaat Mukadam^{1

2}, Wanbing Zhang¹, Xiaodong Liu¹, Andrew E Budson^{3

4}, Angela Gutchess¹

Affiliations

¹ Brandeis University, Department of Psychology, Waltham, MA, United States.
² Boston University, Sargent School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Boston, MA, United States.
³ VA Boston Healthcare System, Jamaica Plain, MA, United States.
⁴ Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, United States.

Abstract

This study investigated how emotional language usage impacts self-referential effects in memory in healthy older adults and individuals with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). To heighten self-focus, 37 healthy older adults and 22 aMCI participants narrated autobiographical memories and then encoded words using a self-referencing or a semantic strategy. We were interested in how narrating autobiographical memories impacted subsequent memory. We probed narrative language usage with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count text analysis program, testing the degree to which language from the narrated autobiographical memories contain emotional (positive and negative) words that predicted the self-reference effect across groups. Results indicated that higher levels of positive emotional language were related to larger self-reference effects in memory. In conclusion, narrating autobiographical memories using emotional language influenced the effectiveness of self-referencing as a memory strategy for both healthy older adults and aMCI participants.

Keywords: Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI); Autobiographical memory; Emotion; Episodic memory; Healthy aging; Language; Self.

Abstract

Grants and funding