Schedule of Events | Symposia

The Relationship Between Physiological Arousal and the Emotional-Trade Off Effect in Younger and Middle-Aged Adults

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

SEHAM KAFAFI¹ (skafafi@nd.edu); ¹University of Notre Dame

Negative experiences are often more memorable than neutral ones, partly due to the central noradrenergic system, particularly the amygdala, activating during negative emotion encoding. This activation, driven by the norepinephrine-releasing locus coeruleus, enhances physiological arousal responses like increased heart rate and sweating, marking events as goal-relevant. This study examines how physiological arousal during encoding affects memory for negative and neutral scenes in younger and middle-aged adults. A multi-level structural equation model was employed to predict whether trial-level arousal enhances memory for items or backgrounds. Greater skin conductance response to negative scenes was linked to poorer memory for negative versus neutral objects, while greater heart rate deceleration predicted better memory for negative objects. Both age groups showed higher false alarm rates for negative scenes, but middle-aged adults were more prone to such errors, indicating increased susceptibility to memory distortions with age. These findings suggest physiological arousal may overgeneralize negative memory encoding, with this effect intensifying as individuals age.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic