Examining the impact of emotional similarity on face memory and face-context associative memory in younger and older adults

Facial source memory and associative memory are particularly susceptible to emotional influences, with emotional congruence modulating memory performance. Despite extensive research on emotion and memory, the interaction between emotional similarity and memory processes across different age groups remains underexplored. This thesis investigates the effect of emotional similarity on face memory and face-context associative memory across younger and older adults. A total of 50 younger adults aged 17 to 25 and 42 older adults aged 65 to 80 participated in the current study. Four types of negative emotional facial expressions and contextual photos (disgust, anger, fear, and sadness) were used as experimental materials. Facial expressions were selected from the FACES database while contextual scenes were drawn from the International Affective Picture System and generated using the 'getimg.ai' program. During the experimental task, first, participants were required to view a series of face-context composite images, including congruent and incongruent (high vs. low) trials, and identify the emotion conveyed by the facial expression. After the distractor task, they took a recognition test for studied and unstudied facial expressions. For the studied ones, they were further shown three context images associated with each face: intact, rearranged, and new. Participants were told to identify the context scene presented with the facial expressions during the study phase. The results have shown distinct age-related differences in memory performance, highlighting that younger adults outperform older adults in recognizing sources of face-context pairings (intact), whereas older adults rely more on contextual familiarity. Additionally, emotional congruence enhances recognition memory performance, while low-similarity conditions impair retrieval by introducing ambiguity and cognitive interference. In conclusion, by investigating these factors, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of how emotional factors shape memory processes across the lifespan, offering insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying age-related memory differences.