Culture, attitudes, and emotional memory: A complicated relationship (original) (raw)
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A Cross-Cultural Examination of the Positivity Effect in Memory: United States vs. China
The International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 2012
Many studies conducted in the United States (U.S.) have documented a positivity effect in aging—a tendency for older adults to remember more positive than negative information in comparison to young adults. Despite this cognitive emotional benefit, U.S. adults still hold a more negative view of aging compared to adults in Asia. We hypothesized that these aging stereotypes may contribute to different patterns of age-related emotional memory processing in the two cultures. In the present study, we tested young and older adults in the U.S. and China on a View of Aging task and an emotional picture memory task. Chinese older adults hold a significantly more positive view of aging compared to all other groups of participants. Older adults in both countries demonstrated an age-related positivity effect, but Chinese older adults showed a trend in remembering fewer negative pictures than their American counterparts. These findings suggest that aging stereotypes might significantly influence...
A Cultural Perspective on Emotional Experiences Across the Life Span
Past research suggests that older adults place a greater priority on goals of maintaining positive experiences and distancing from negative experiences. We hypothesized that these aging-related differences in emotional experiences are more pronounced in Western cultures that encourage linear approaches to well-being compared with Eastern cultures that encourage more dialectic approaches to well-being. We compared reports of positive and negative emotional experiences from random samples of Americans (a culture characterized by focus on positive and distancing from negative experiences) and Japanese (a culture characterized by its endorsement of dialectical experiences). In support of our hypothesis, older Americans reported significantly less negative emotions in unpleasant situations, relative to their younger counterparts. Furthermore, both trait-level negativity (i.e., rumination) and interpersonal negativity (i.e., recall of unpleasant relationships and intensity of an unpleasant interpersonal experience) were lower among older compared with younger Americans. In contrast, such aging-related effects were absent in the Japanese respondents. Even though older and younger Japanese reported the same amount of negative emotions in unpleasant situations, older Japanese also reported more positive emotions in the same unpleasant situations. Together, these findings highlight the role of culture for understanding how emotional experiences unfold across adulthood.
The Effects of Culture and View of Aging on Perspective Taking in Young Adults
Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 2021
Young adults' ability to recall a story about others, especially of an older adult, may be influenced by culture-based views on aging. In the present study, we extended a perspective-taking paradigm designed by Sullivan et al. (2010) by adding a cultural component to the methodology and testing participants' perspective-taking performance. Participants from the United States and Hong Kong heard two stories about a 25-year-old and a 75-year-old character from either location. Overall, we found that both groups recalled more negative than positive events. However, Hong Kong participants, who showed a more negative view of aging than US participants, used more negative words to describe the older adult than the young adult story. These findings suggest an intricate relationship between culture-based views of aging and the language used in the recall of emotional events.
Psychology and Aging, 2009
Older adults' relatively better memory for positive over negative material (positivity effect) has been widely observed in Western samples. This study examined whether a relative preference for positive over negative material is also observed in older Koreans. Younger and older Korean participants viewed images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), were tested for recall and recognition of the images, and rated the images for valence. Cultural differences in the valence ratings of images emerged. Once considered, the relative preference for positive over negative material in memory observed in older Koreans was indistinguishable from that observed previously in older Americans.
Perceptions of aging across 26 cultures and their culture-level associates
Psychology and Aging, 2009
College students (N ϭ 3,435) in 26 cultures reported their perceptions of age-related changes in physical, cognitive, and socioemotional areas of functioning and rated societal views of aging within their culture. There was widespread cross-cultural consensus regarding the expected direction of aging trajectories with (a) perceived declines in societal views of aging, physical attractiveness, the ability to perform everyday tasks, and new learning; (b) perceived increases in wisdom, knowledge, and received respect; and (c) perceived stability in family authority and life satisfaction. Cross-cultural variations in aging perceptions were associated with culture-level indicators of population aging, education levels, values, and national character stereotypes. These associations were stronger for societal views on aging and perceptions of socioemotional changes than for perceptions of physical and cognitive changes. A consideration of culture-level variables also suggested that previously reported differences in aging perceptions between Asian and Western countries may be related to differences in population structure.
Journal of Gerontology, 1999
There is evidence that East Asians are biased to process information in a holistic, contextual fashion, whereas Western Europeans process information in an analytic, feature-based style. We argue that these cultural differences in information processing styles are so pervasive that they affect cognitive function at the most basic levels, including the mechanics of cognition. However, as individuals age, it is not always the case that culture effects on cognitive processes magnify, despite many additional years of exposure to the culture. Neurobiological decline in cognitive function that occurs with age is a cognitive universal and can limit the strategies used in late adulthood, resulting in more similarity in cognitive function in late adulthood across cultures than is observed in young adulthood We present a theoretical framework for understanding the impact of aging on cognitive function cross-culturally. The importance of developing culture-invariant measures of processing resources is emphasized and methodological issues associated with the cross-cultural study of aging are addressed
Culture impacts the magnitude of the emotion-induced memory trade-off effect
Cognition & emotion, 2017
The present study assessed the extent to which culture impacts the emotion-induced memory trade-off effect. This trade-off effect occurs because emotional items are better remembered than neutral ones, but this advantage comes at the expense of memory for backgrounds such that neutral backgrounds are remembered worse when they occurred with an emotional item than with a neutral one. Cultures differ in their prioritisation of focal object versus contextual background information, with Westerners focusing more on objects and Easterners focusing more on backgrounds. Americans, a Western culture, and Turks, an Eastern-influenced culture, incidentally encoded positive, negative, and neutral items placed against neutral backgrounds, and then completed a surprise memory test with the items and backgrounds tested separately. Results revealed a reduced trade-off for Turks compared to Americans. Although both groups exhibited an emotional enhancement in item memory, Turks did not show a decre...
The Gerontologist
Background and Objectives: Attitudes about aging influence how people feel about their aging and affect psychological and health outcomes in later life. Given cross-cultural variability in such attitudes, the subjective experience of aging (e.g., subjective age [SA]) may also vary, potentially accounting for culture-specific patterns of aging-related outcomes. Our study explored cultural variation in SA and its determinants. Research Design and Methods: American (N = 569), Chinese (N = 492), and German (N = 827) adults aged 30-95 years completed a questionnaire that included instruments measuring basic demographic information, SA, beliefs about thresholds of old age, control over life changes, and age dependency of changes in eight different life domains (i.e., family, work). Results: Analyses revealed consistency across cultures in the domain-specificity of SA, but differences in the amount of shared variance across domains (e.g., Chinese adults exhibited greater homogeneity across domains than did Americans and Germans). Cultural differences were also observed in levels of SA in some domains, which were attenuated by domainspecific beliefs (e.g., control). Interestingly, beliefs about aging accounted for more cultural variation in SA than did sociodemographic factors (e.g., education). Discussion and Implications: Our results demonstrate that subjective perceptions of aging and everyday functioning may be best understood from a perspective focused on context (i.e., culture, life domain). Given its important relation to functioning, examination of cross-cultural differences in the subjective experience of aging may highlight factors that determine variations in aging-related outcomes that then could serve as targets of culture-specific interventions promoting well-being in later life.