Can Young and Older Adults Be Directed to Forget Emotional Words?
Undergraduate Research Project Jaclyn Portelli Advisors: Elizabeth A. Kensinger and Brendan Murray Forgetting is traditionally considered a passive process, in which information degrades over time. Recent behavioral evidence by Anderson & Green (2001), however, suggests that using executive control processes can also facilitate forgetting—that is, forgetting can be an active process. Anderson & Green demonstrated that young adults could forget previously learned information when directed to, while current research in our own laboratory has indicated that older adults (aged 65+) can also engage in voluntary forgetting. However, little is known about how the emotionality of to-be-forgotten information affects the forgetting process. Recent research on aging, cognition, and emotion (Mather & Carstensen, 2005) has indicated that older and young adults prioritize emotional information in different ways, and as such, it was expected that older and young adults might show differential pattern
