Age-related differences in the effects of emotional context on encoding and recall: Strategy selection and execution

This study examined the influence of positive, negative, and neutral emotional contexts, presented as background IAPS images, on encoding strategy selection (Experiment 1), strategy execution (Experiment 2), and subsequent recall performance across young and older adults. In Experiment 1, participants selected either mental imagery or repetition strategy to encode neutral words presented in the emotional or neutral contexts. Results showed that emotional context did not influence strategy choice in either age group, with older adults consistently preferring repetition across contexts, whereas young adults exhibiting greater variability in strategy choice. Consistently, recall accuracy did not vary across emotional contexts as a function of the chosen strategy in either age group. In Experiment 2, when strategy was imposed, emotional context influenced recall when encoding was executed by mental imagery, in both young and older adults. Notably, recall was lower in the negative context than in the neutral and positive contexts, with no difference between the latter two emotional contexts. Repetition produced similar recall in all emotional contexts. Interestingly, in both neutral and positive contexts, recall was higher after encoding by mental imagery than by repetition, while no difference was observed in negative context. These data indicate that task-irrelevant emotional context may primarily impact strategy execution rather than strategy selection, and that negative context can impair the effectiveness of deep encoding (i.e., mental imagery) similarly across age groups.