 It is now my pleasure to introduce to you Professor June Klubeck from our Health and Exercise Science Department, who will introduce our first speaker, Dr. Laura Karstensen, who will talk to you on motivation, emotion, and aging. Good morning. A few weeks ago, I found out that I was going to be introducing Laura Karstensen at this conference, so I did what any savvy 21st century person would do, and I went online and I did a Google search. And in this search, I turned up a tale of two very different Laura Karstensens. One was a Stanford research psychologist, while the other was a hip teenager who wrote poetry about unicorns and rainbows. I can't tell you how happy and relieved I am to be talking and introducing about the former Laura Karstensen. Exciting new research indicates that growing older might not necessarily mean growing mentally slower. New studies are providing breakthroughs in our understanding of how aging affects memory, language, and other cognitive functions. And that's good news, considering the enormous growth that the United States is going to be facing in its proportion of elderly people. The figures from the United States Census indicate that the number of people over the age of 65 will reach about 70 million by the year 2030. That's more than double the current numbers. Dr. Laura Karstensen is a leading researcher in the field of geriatric psychology. She's currently a professor of psychology at Stanford University, where she's been a member of the faculty since 1987. From 1997 to 2001, she served as the Barbara D. Feinberg Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and in 1998, she received Stanford Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching. In addition to her teaching duties, Dr. Karstensen also serves as the Director of Stanford's Lifespan Development Laboratory. Her research here focuses on social, emotional, and the cognitive processes that people use to adapt to life circumstances as they age. It specifically focuses on motivation and emotional functioning. Her research team studies the ways in which motivation changes developmentally and how this relates to emotional processing and emotional regulation. Research from Dr. Karstensen's laboratory has contributed to a growing literature that suggests that our emotional system works well even in very old age, and the ability to experience emotions deeply and regulate them effectively may even improve with age. According to Dr. Karstensen, demographic changes in the population are being viewed as a crisis on the horizon when added years of lifespan actually present an incredible opportunity to improve the quality of life at all ages. Her personal research is supported primarily through the National Institute on Aging and focuses on social-emotional selectivity theory, emotional development throughout the lifespan, the role of social relationships play in psychological well-being, and the influence and motivation on cognitive processes in old age. Most recently, she has published research showing the ways in which motivational changes influence cognitive processing in older adults. Her ambitious research agenda has garnered her the Richard Collish Award for Innovative Research. Dr. Karstensen states that according to her research, old age is for many people a relatively happy time of life, and her theory of social-emotional selectivity suggests that as the perceived future shortens, people focus more and more of their attention and energy on emotional goals such as maintaining satisfying interpersonal relationships and less and less on knowledge-related goals such as getting an education, and the result is positive emotions become a high priority. Well, it's easy to see why a 50 or 60-year-old individual might be interested in studying aging, but what would make a 21-year-old interested in studying the process of aging? Well, of course, there's a story that goes with this, and Dr. Karstensen, when she was 21, was in a car accident, and she ended up in a long convalescent period with some other senior citizens sort of around her. Spending time with the senior population as a 21-year-old, kind of imagine what that would be like, but for her, in addition to taking her first psychology class, this spurred her interest in studying the aging population. She was observing the seniors, and not only that, but watching how they were treated by the healthcare staff. Dr. Karstensen's publications show this familiar thread of geriatrics almost from the start of her work, but they explore such diverse topics within this field as marital relationships within elderly couples, mental health of older trauma survivors, and the influence of HIV status and age on cognitive representation of others. Dr. Karstensen is currently a chair of the National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Research Agenda for the Social Psychology of Aging, and a panel member of the National Institute of Aging Behavioral and Social Science Review Committee, Holy Toledo. She is also the chair of the Board of Science Advisors at Berat to the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. Dr. Karstensen is a fellow at the Gerontological Society of America and the American Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association, and she's also been an active member on several editorial boards in her discipline. In addition to this already jam-packed schedule, Dr. Karstensen finds time to devote to her duties as an Associate Director of the Term and Gifted Project and as an affiliate faculty member at Stanford's Geriatric Education Center and at Stanford School of Medicine. She also serves as a core faculty member for the American Psychological Association's Minority Fellowship Program. According to Dr. Karstensen, quote, clearly this is a time of great promise for learning and how our brains mature. Even more important, this knowledge can and should be used to make life better for many older people as possible. There's a lot of evidence suggesting that older people are doing very well. Our challenge is to figure out what they're doing and how they're doing it. Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome the lovely and gracious Dr. Laura Karstensen. Thank you so much, June. And thank you all for being here today. It really is a great pleasure, and it's been wonderful to begin to get to know some of the people here at Gustavus. I have to say that ever since I accepted this invitation, I've been hearing from various people in various corners of my world about it. And I don't mean just saying a nice sentence about Gustavus. I mean testimonials. Eleanor McAbee, one of my colleagues, was here for this very conference a few years ago and came back all abuzz. Then recently I told Sharon and Gordon Bauer, dear friends and colleagues of mine at Stanford, that I was coming to Gustavus. And Sharon says, oh, I grew up in St. Peter, and I graduated from Gustavus in 1954. Gordon Bauer, who's one of the most cited cognitive psychologists in the field, but more notably Sharon's husband, attended summer school at Gustavus. And he pitched baseball for the St. Peter Saints. Then two days ago I get an email message from an assistant professor, Kathleen Vos, who teaches at the University of British Columbia. And I met her last summer at an institute where I taught. And I met her just briefly. But I get this email and she says, now this might sound odd, but I heard that you're going to talk at the Nobel Conference at Gustavus, and I just have to tell you how exciting that is. She said it was attending that conference in 1995 that inspired her to become a researcher and to go to graduate school. And then last night I met my gracious hosts, Kim Asad and Jake Hansen. And they're just brimming with excitement about this school, this place, and this conference. So it seems that there's a sort of magic about this place. And I guess I just want to say thank you for sharing it with me. Thank you. Now, just before this session started this morning, I met two young men, Erin and David, high school students from Mankato. Are you here, Erin, David? Yay! And we were just chatting with Professor Olshansky, and I sort of started to get on this soapbox that I get on occasionally about aging, and they said, talk about that. And I thought, well, that'd be fun, but actually it wouldn't be really good for me or you if I totally put aside my notes. But I can't help, but do that a little bit. And just say before I start that we are living at an incredible time in human history. And less than a century, we nearly doubled life expectancy. This is a change unprecedented in the history of the species. So average life expectancy for most of human evolution was about 27 years. And then it kind of inches up by the 1800s, 1900s, early 1900s, it was about 47. And then, bam, in a matter of decades, the average life expectancy has increased dramatically. In 2000, just as the millennium came in, they kept interviewing scientists and public figures about what the greatest advances were in the 20th century, and not a one mentioned roughly 30 extra years of time. This may be one of the greatest gifts that our ancestors have ever been able to give to a particular generation. And what we're doing in this country and around the world, unfortunately, is that we're running around saying, the sky is falling. We're going to have all these old people as frail, old decrepit societies. What are we going to do? There aren't going to be enough people around to take care of them. The questions largely are about, how do we cope with older people and older societies? And we want to ask some of those questions, but we need to change the primary question to, how do we change the nature of human aging so that people come to old age mentally sharp and physically fit? And then it's not a discussion about old age anymore. It's a discussion about long life. And that's a discussion worth having. So I'm going to get down off my soapbox. Thank you. I'll now turn and talk about something I actually know about and try to give you some empirical evidence that we've been generating over the past 20 years or so in my laboratory. I'm going to talk today about motivational changes that are associated with normal aging. And these are changes that have implications for goals, preferences, and choices across adulthood. But still my aim today is to convince you that the story about aging is more complex and more interesting than the simple story of decline traditionally told. Now I argue that this is the implicit theory that guides most research on aging. We have age. And then here we have just any variable you like. It doesn't really matter. And this is how people think about it in the general population. That's how people scientists think about it, too. You know, you have a variable. You say, well, let's compare young and old people. Old people, we predict, will be worse. It is a model or an implicit theory that has generated a lot of research. And the bad news is there's a lot of evidence to support it. Here are some actual data comparing performance on a number of cognitive tasks. And you see down here people from their 20s and 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. And these are measures of a lot of different kinds of tests. But all of them measure something we call in psychology processing capacity. It's the speed and the integrity with which people process new information. And processing capacity declines with age. These are data that you see on this slide from Denise Park's lab. And they're cross-sectional data that is comparing different people at different ages at different points in time. But other studies have been run longitudinally following the same group of people over time. And you also see a decline in processing capacity. So this involves things like working memory, the ability to keep multiple pieces of information online while you operate on them. It has to do with things like perceptual speed, switching back and forth from one stimulus to another, the kinds of things that would be involved, say, in typing from a piece of text onto a computer keyboard. So you're switching back and forth. These are kinds of component processings of cognitive functioning that appear to reliably decline with age. And for those of you who are thinking maybe you're educated enough or smart enough or rich enough to escape this, these are really reliable and robust. And they occur pretty much the same way, regardless of education, of socioeconomic status, race, sex. We're still seeing these kinds of declines with age. This is a lot of different information to keep in mind. So if you want a summary slide to just sum up what I've just told you, here's a cartoon. High above the hushed crowd, Rex tried to remain focused. Still, he couldn't shake one nagging thought. He was an old dog, and this was a new trick. Some people are actually surprised when they get to old age and find that they don't feel quite as bad as they expected to. This was the cover of a New York Times magazine section a couple of years back. And the fact of the matter is that most healthy older adults are functioning quite well, increasingly more so as they come to old age better educated and healthier than previous cohorts. It turns out that there's an interesting twist to this story of decline. First of all, although we hear most about these findings, if you measure knowledge, what people know, actually what people really think of as real intelligence, you know, that is whether you can solve a problem or not, world knowledge is actually, if anything, increasing, but certainly staying stable well into advanced old age. So even though the ability to process new information is declining, there's nothing about aging free of disease that means that people can't continue to know access and benefit from what they've learned. So the more years you have, the more time you have, the more experience you have to gain new knowledge. But second, the pattern of decline even here is interesting because it turns out that it doesn't map perfectly or arguably even well onto performance in everyday life. That is people who perform relatively poor on those tasks sometimes are functioning better in their worlds than people who perform relatively well on those tasks, so there's not a perfect way to take what we learned in the laboratory and then make predictions about how people are going to live. And this is incredibly important news because it suggests that there may be ways to modify performance. So let me first place the work that I'll talk about from my laboratory into a broader context of other people's research that has been published over the years. First, I'm going to walk you through the slide, so don't worry about it here. But this is a classic study at this point, a classic result, and it's referred to, this is by Paul Baltus and Reinold Klegel, and it's referred to as the testing the limits paradigm. And it's really about experience, practice, and then the limits of what can be done with practice. So in this study, it's a study of memory, one of the areas that clearly declines with age. And the green line, this is old people, and the orange line, young people. Let's see if I can get this to work, right? So we see this. Now, this difference here, and it's a significant difference between young and old, is on the first day they come in for the study. So old and young people are recruited to come into the laboratory. They're given a word list. They're asked to remember as many of those words as they can. And then, and we see a difference. Young people outperform old people. Young people always outperform old people on memory tasks, pretty much. But then they have people return, the same people return, and they get more training sessions in memory strategies. Now what I want to point out to you is this finding right here. So this is after about seven practice sessions. Older people are now performing better than the younger people did when they first walked in off the street. Practice experience matters. People can improve over these kinds of baseline levels with practice. Now the reason there are also limits revealed in this paradigm is young people also benefit from practice. So they're getting better too. So at no point, even after all this practice, younger people are still outperforming older people. But it's a very important finding that with practice we see improvement. So this kind of memory decline is not fixed and intractable. It's something that is somewhat flexible and fluid and experience matters. There's plasticity in this system. Well more recently, psychologists have begun to ask questions about social conditions that influence performance. And they've found an interesting pattern. Now probably most of you have heard that memory declines with age. Most people in the general population have heard this, especially older people have heard this. And Lynn Hasher, a professor at the University of Toronto and her colleagues decided that they would bring people into the laboratory and tell some of them, this is a memory test. We're going to give you a memory test. We're gonna see how many words you can memorize. And we want you to perform as well as you can. But in another condition, she brought people into the laboratory older and younger and she said, I want you to learn as many of these as you can. So there's not such a big negative aging stereotype about learning, it's more about memory specifically. And she compared the performance of younger and older people on this test and this is what she finds. She finds that when you emphasize memory, you see big differences between younger adults and older adults in their performance. But when you say learning in this study, there was no age difference between older and younger adults. Older adults reported learning as many words as younger people did. Well, Tom has recently replicated this basic effect and he also showed that there were changes in strategy use. So in the next study I'm gonna show you, what they did here is in three different conditions, they bring older and younger people into the lab and they have them read a newspaper article before they take a memory test. One of the newspaper articles is a very positive summary of new information about memory that looks like it's not as bad as we thought basically. And then there's a control condition that's just irrelevant to aging. And then there's a negative one and this is, boy, more evidence out about memory, it's really bad. Find somebody to help you now because it's looking dim. And has compared the performance of people in these different conditions. Now the orange bar here, this is young people and you can see it doesn't make much difference. Whatever they read, as I said, they perform well in this memory test. What's important to notice though is that older people in the positive condition perform significantly better than older people who read the negative article. So what people are expecting about a performance that they're about to give influences that performance. Now what was also interesting in the HESP study is he studied something called semantic clustering. So when people are performing a memory task, one way you can optimize your performance, here's a tip for the day, is to put the words together that are like one another, the words that have common meaning. And what he found is that the people in the positive condition were more likely to use that strategy than people in the negative condition. So it looked like people were trying harder when they had read the positive condition. They were now using impressive kinds of strategies that are helpful. So these kinds of changes, these kinds of findings I should say, begin to speak to motivation. And I would like to focus the remainder of my remarks today on motivational changes that are related to the perception of time and how those motivational changes influence goals, memory, and attention. The theory that we have developed is called socio-emotional selectivity theory. This is a theory that is really grounded in the uniquely human ability to monitor time. Now, I don't mean clock time or calendar time, but lifetime. Humans are, to the best of our knowledge, the only species aware of our own mortality. Now, I don't mean we're the only species that knows when we're dying. When I give these talks, somebody always says, my dog knew when my dog was dying. And that may be, but I'm talking about the ability to monitor where we are in life and to appreciate mortality. That is to appreciate that there is ultimately a limit on the amount of time that we have available to us to realize our goals. Now, people regularly at conscious and subconscious levels take account of the time that they have left. Jean Calmet was the oldest person in the world when she died at the age of 122 in 1997. She had been interviewed when she was 120, and the journalist had asked her what sort of a future she anticipated. I don't know about that, but. Calmet responded in the way that she did throughout most of her life in a sharp and witty way. She said to the question, what sort of a future do you imagine? She said, a very short one. But you don't have to be 120 to recognize that time is in some sense running out. There are lots of reminders. These reminders are good and bad. They're the births of children, and those children graduate from high school. They go off and they have children of their own. They graduate from high school. They're the deaths of friends and loved ones, ill health in others and oneself. And all of these signals throughout life provide gentle and not so gentle reminders that life is limited. Well, in socio-emotional selectivity theory, my colleagues and I argue that goals are always set in temporal contexts, and because time left in life is inextricably related to chronological age, age-related goals are apparent. Now, when time is perceived as expansive, as it typically is in youth, people engage in a motivational frame, a motivational set that's really designed to prepare them for the future. So under these conditions, people expand their horizons. They're interested in learning new things and acquiring knowledge and meeting new people and taking chances, taking risks, because there's a lot of time ahead of you to repair from any downside of taking that risk. And so people are in an expansive kind of mode when they're preparing for the future. But in contrast, when boundaries on time are perceived, people direct attention to emotionally meaningful goals. When time is constrained, people focus on the present. They tend to live more in the moment, to be able to see very clearly just what's important and what's not. When time is perceived as limited in some way, people invest in sure things, which for most people are relationships and they tend to deepen those relationships and to savor life. That is under conditions where the time is limited, where the future is limited in some way, people stop and smell the roses. They see the birds, they notice things that are beautiful in the world. And they tend to focus on feeling states and emotional meaning. So under these conditions, when one is focusing on the present, people focus on the regulation of emotion states. That is how one feels is in a very important signal to whether one's behaving in a way that is appropriate given those kinds of time constraints. To give you an example, I mean clearly all of you are very high on information seeking, as we would say. I mean you're interested in learning new things and in education. But imagine that we got word that the world was likely to end tomorrow. How many of you would still wanna finish out the day? Probably not a lot of you. I know I wouldn't. And you would also know exactly who you'd wanna be with and what you'd wanna be doing. It would all be ever so clear. And in that way, the future becomes irrelevant and the present moment becomes very, very important. So according to this theory, it's time perception, not age, that accounts for some of the age differences that we see in people's preferences and goals. What I wanna do in my remaining minutes is to talk about or show you some data supporting each of three general theoretical postulates that are derived from the theory. And the first of those is that perceived constraints on time motivate people to pursue emotionally meaningful goals. Later I'll turn to some evidence that goals influence cognitive processing and that pursuing emotional goals is really good for mental health. Well, the first of these that perceived constraints on time motivate people to pursue emotionally meaningful goals is a difficult one. It's difficult to study motivation and just ask people what they're motivated to do. Again, I could ask you why you're here and maybe you would say, well, I wanted to see some friends, others would say I wanted to learn something, others would say, well, there's a symbolic meaning to being back at Gustavus. But it's really hard for people to articulate that. Freud was right on this one, that it's hard for people to say what their motives really are. But one way psychologists have found to do this is to ask people to make trade-offs. So we present people with different options and then we say which of these do you choose and that tends to reflect the goals that they're interested in pursuing. So several years ago, a former student of mine and I developed a social partner choice paradigm. What we do is we provide people with three different options of people that they could spend time with and they represent different kinds of goals. So the author of a book you've just read is one that's somebody who could probably provide a lot of information but not necessarily a lot of emotion meaning. Recent acquaintance with whom you appear to have much in common, that would be somebody who has the fantasy of a future attached to contact with them. And then there's a member of your immediate family and for most people, for better or for worse, a member contact with people in their family is emotionally significant. Well we hypothesize that since older people are more likely to perceive constraints on time that they'd be more likely to choose a member of their immediate family, the emotionally significant person of these three but that younger people wouldn't show this kind of pattern. And in fact, that's what we find. So older people are showing the large majority of older people are picking the member of their immediate family, the emotionally meaningful partner, but younger people's responses were pretty evenly distributed across those three different options. But now, according to our theory, this isn't about age, it's about time. So in a second condition, we say, now I want you to imagine that you're about to move across country. You're going by yourself without family or friends. You're in the middle of packing, but you find yourself with 30 minutes free. Who do you choose? Well now younger people look just like older people. Now younger people are also choosing a member of their immediate family to spend time with. So under these conditions where we've constrained time, we've now eliminated this age difference. Well we thought this was pretty cool because for years people have talking about these differences and preferences as something due to intractable developmental kinds of age differences. This looks like they're pretty fluid. We can get young people to look like old people. But of course the real challenge here to us we thought well could we get old people to look like young people? So we ran the study again. And in the first condition, look we replicated our original finding, open ended condition, older people show this strong preference. In the second condition we said this, we said I want you to imagine that you just received a phone call from your physician who's told you about a new medical advance that virtually ensures you'll live about 20 years longer in relatively good health. The following three people are available to you. Who do you choose? Now older people are even less likely than younger people to pick members of their immediate family with whom to spend time with. So now we've eliminated this well documented age difference with a sentence. Just with one sentence, it changed the timeframe. Well, if you're like most people, and at least the scientific community in which I live, people say well yeah but those are Californians. And the people in the study were, it's worse than that. They're all from either San Francisco County or Los Angeles County. So okay. So we thought well maybe this is a peculiarly American thing or California thing. Would we really see this in another place? A former student of mine, Helene Fung is from Hong Kong and she said I wonder if we'd see it in Hong Kong because there are also some very different values placed on family contact and so on. But we do find the same kind of age difference in a sample in Hong Kong. And in Hong Kong we collected these data in 1997 and as you know this was the year of the handover of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China. And so there was a lot of immigration going on. So in our second condition we say now imagine you're about to emigrate, you're going by yourself, no family or friends, who do you choose? Everybody picks a member of their immediate family, essentially in that condition. Well again this was really great for us as it turns out that 1997 was the year that we collected these data. Helene as I said was from Hong Kong and had to make a lot of decisions about citizenship and so on. So she was following the news in Hong Kong in 97 very closely and she started coming in my office and she would show me different kinds of political cartoons and characters that were portraying the end of Hong Kong. So what you see here is a soup can on the cover of the Far Eastern Economic Review and it says up here expiration date June 30th, 1997. They were selling calendars in Hong Kong in 1997 where you tear off the day, you know each day as the day goes by these little stacks of pages and it ended June 30th, 1997, that was the last day. Another political commentaries were suggesting that everything people knew about life it was gonna end on June 30th, 1997 that Hong Kong itself was an endangered species. And so we began to wonder whether there might not be a macro level cultural priming of endings. So if it's the perception of time and people are perceiving time as being limited in some way, what would we see? And so we went back to Hong Kong and repeated the study just two months before. So these bars here are our original findings, the light. So we see this age difference but two months before the handover that age difference wasn't there and this was without any kind of manipulation on our part where we were telling people to imagine something. We've since replicated these effects in Beijing and Taiwan. For those of you who are thinking Hong Kong is still too western a place, we get the same kind of effects there. And Haline Fung shortly after September 11th ran the same study again in Hong Kong and found that among Hong Kong people we again saw this kind of blip where there was an increase even among young people in wanting to spend time with emotionally close meaningful social partners and that by three months later it had dissipated. Fung has now since then shown also the same kind of effect occurs with SARS so that when the SARS epidemic was well underway in Hong Kong people again were shifting their motivational frame, what they wanted to do. So I hope I convinced you that the perception of time influences goals. I wanna now turn to the second theoretical postulate and that's the goals influence cognitive processing. Now cognitive processing is something that has been approached in psychology largely as something that's kind of context independent. So people are studied in the laboratory and people assume that there's no context there at all and in fact go to great lengths to make sure that the stimuli don't suggest any particular kind of a context. But of course what we process in our brains, what we attend to, what we remember has everything to do with what our goals are, what our motivation is. If you're walking across campus today and you're looking for someone, you see very different things on campus than if you're walking across campus looking for a particular kind of a tree. You'll miss that person altogether in the latter whereas in the other you don't notice the trees at all. So what we're trying to do, what we're trying to accomplish influences what we see and what we process. Our brains do not process all information equally but rather we're highly selective and it's very much dependent on motivation. The most fundamental building blocks of mental processing, things like reinforcement and categorization occur because of motivation. And as categories exist as my colleague Bob Zion says, because some objects and events matter and others don't. So the basic building blocks of cognition are influenced by motivation. Well this is an important point for all of us to know for all psychology regardless of age but there may be particular significance for the study of aging because to the extent that the categories that matter change with age and they do then we would expect to see systematic differences in cognitive processing. In particular we'd expect that emotional information would be more salient, that it would be more deeply processed and more better remembered than non-emotional information. And let me show you some evidence that suggests that this in fact is the case. First I'll show you that this is a slide from a study that I conducted with Susan Charles a former student of Stanford and we gave people young middle-aged, young old, that's like 65 to 75 and then old old, 85 and older. We gave them some text from fiction. It was one from The Shell Seekers and one from Elephants Can Remember and we had this little sex selection and narrative and it had some emotional information in the story and some neutral information, comparable amounts of each. And we asked people to read this story, we don't tell them it's a memory test, they do a lot of other things in the lab for us and then after about an hour we go back and we say, remember that story we gave you, tell us everything you remember from the story. What you see on this slide is the proportion of the emotional content of what people tell and what you can see is this very nice linear effect where increasingly in our older groups, more of what they're telling us they remember was about the emotional part of the study. Well, Fung and I began to wonder if you were trying to persuade older and younger people, if you were an advertiser or if you were trying to sell an important public health message to older adults, if you were trying to get them to do something, that maybe advertisements that featured or promised emotional rewards would be more effective with older people than ads that promise to say expand their horizons, learn new things. And so we worked with an ad agency to develop some pairs of advertisements and the advertisements are identical except for the slogan. So in this one, this is a camera ad and this says capture the unexplored world. So it's suggesting you buy our camera, you're gonna go off and do lots of interesting new things. But here's the matching ad in this pair and it says capture those special moments. Everything else is identical in the ad, the product, the pictures, but the slogan is very different. Here's another example. This is a watch ad, so successes within reach don't let time pass you by versus take time for the ones you love don't let time pass you by. Well, we were interested in which ones older and younger people prefer and you see strong preferences in older people for the emotional slogans. So when there's an emotional promise associated with a product older people prefer that ad far more than younger people do with younger people they're not showing this kind of preference. Now again, let me return to this time issue. We're saying you see this kind of difference in older and younger people because of the perception of time. So in a side study in this program of research we presented people with these both ads at the same time. But before we showed them the ads and we just walked up to people in shopping malls, train stations and so on, this is where we got these data and we said, imagine you just got a phone call from your physician who told you about a new medical advance that ensures you live about 20 years longer and relatively good health. Could you help us figure out, given that, help us figure out which of these ads do you like the best? And what you see here in this time expanded condition is that now older people are no longer showing this strong preference for the emotional ads they look much like younger people. So these are the data you saw before but this is when we say now change the time frame and then you see this disappear. Okay, well what about memory for these ads? In younger people, as I said, it makes no difference they remember the ads well and they remember that either kind. But with older adults, they remember the emotionally meaningful slogans better than the same ads and the same products when they're promised or framed in terms of knowledge gain. Well, we began to wonder why this, what the reason for this motivational shift is and given that, what the reason was, would people prefer all kinds of emotional information or particularly pay attention to positive information in the environment? That is, if you're motivated to regulate your emotional states, to feel positive, to pursue emotional meaning in life, would you wanna look at negative and positive information all of it and maybe you would because you wanna notice what's negative to navigate the minefields out there in the world, right? But it may be that people selectively notice what's positive because that helps make people feel better in the moment. On this point, the theory was equivocal and we began to run some studies where we separated, we parsed negative and positive emotional stimuli. In one study, we show people slides and these slides are of positive images. This is positive for those of you who didn't get this one. As is this. Then we have negative images. I'll show you those quickly. Cockroach on a pizza, a duck in an oil spill, and neutral and believe me, I understand that this is not a neutral image for many of you. As it turns out, it is in the general population and this is another neutral image and so we show people a series of images and they look at all these images and then we test their memory for the images so we can either do that with recall that is write down all the images you remember or recognition, we can show them ones and say did you see this or didn't you? So we test the memory in different ways. And here's what we get for our memory findings. In young people, they remember the emotional ones, not surprisingly, better than the neutral ones. In middle-aged people, they're beginning to show a slight advantage here for the positive images and in older adults, they perform much better for the positive images than the negative ones or the neutral ones. We've begun to call this the positivity effect. Older people disproportionately remember things that are positive and not that are negative. Now I also wanna point out in this slide that younger people are still outperforming older people overall, but this is your typical comparison and whoops, I can't do two at the same time. So this comparison is the typical cognitive aging study and you're getting a different kind of a sense when you look at the emotion piece of this story. Well, when you do this kind of a memory test, you don't know as a researcher, we don't know whether people aren't retrieving the information, that is they remembered it, they encoded it somewhere, but they can't draw it out or if they're not attending to the information, they're not encoding it in the first place. And from these kinds of studies, you can't know. But we turn to a colleague of mine, John Gabrielli, who is a neuroscientist and Mara Mather, who is the lead author on this next paper and we essentially ran the same study, but we ran it while people were in a brain scanner. So we could look at brain activation when they first saw the images. We then later tested their memory, so it was the same kind of paradigm as you saw in this first study that I described to you, but now they see these slides while they're in a brain scanner so we can look at brain activation. In this slide, you're seeing the proportions. It's the same finding as you saw in the other one where the other one I gave you the overall means, but as you can see, the proportion of what older people are remembering of positive slides is much greater than the negative, whereas with younger people, they're remembering the emotional ones, positive and negative, equally. Well, I have to tell you a piece of this story and I'll just mention it at the end of, which is coming at the end of my remarks. Older people regulate their emotions better than younger people do if you ask them. That is, if you ask people, do you regulate your emotions better than you do when you were younger? Think about it for a second. Don't most of you, the vast majority of people in our studies say, yeah, yeah. And only a very few say no. So people by that measure suggest that they recall, that they regulate better, but to psychologists, that's not a very satisfying, it's not a satisfying answer to just hear people say that because there could be a lot of reasons. And I've asked people over the years many times, so if you regulate your emotions better, what are you doing? And over 20 years, the most common answer that people give me is, I just don't think about it. Meaning the negative things. And again, it's not very satisfying to a psychologist. We wanna know something more. But Mara Mather comes into my office and she shows me the brain scans. And I will show them to you. What you see on this side are the older brains, the younger brains. The chartreuse color here is activation in response to the positive stimuli. The red is activation in response to the negative. Younger people, we see both. Look at the older, I look at this and I said, they just don't think about it. This is activation, this isn't memory. But I'm gonna show you some data from the amygdala. The amygdala is the region of the brain that stores emotion memories. And what we find is, again, exactly what you'd expect to find in younger adults where younger adults show increased activation in the amygdala when you show them the emotion images. And here's what happens when you show older people the emotion images. The positive images you see, significant increase in amygdala activation and not so to the negative and neutral. This suggests that attention is key. That is, what people are paying attention to in coding is key to understanding these differences behaviorally in memory. Because attention was so clearly implicated in this finding, we decided to run another study that allows us to look at attention. And in this study, younger and older people come into the laboratory and they see on the computer screen just what you're seeing. They see two faces, it's always of the same person. One is always posing a neutral face, one image, and the other, an emotion face, either a negative one, sadness or anger, or a positive one, a smile. Well, what we're interested in is which of these images do people attend to? Which are they drawn to? When they have a choice right in front of them. There are two images here, you can orient toward one, or you can orient toward the other. The way that we do this is we ask them first to look at a blank screen where there's a cross in the middle and we say, just train your attention on the cross. Then two faces appear, they're there for one second, they disappear, and a dot appears behind one face or the other. The participant's job is simply to hit a key on one side of the keyboard or the other indicating where the dot appeared. This is not a hard task, everybody gets them right. It's just a matter of how long it takes them to do it. If you're already looking at the negative face when that disappears and you see the dot, you're faster than if you were looking at the neutral one. And so this allows us to see which face people are attending to. So I'm gonna take you through this again. So pretend you're a participant in one of our studies, train your attention on the cross, faces appear, dot, that's the way that this works. And here's what we find. For younger people, it makes no difference if it's a negative or positive face paired with the neutral one. But for older people, when it's a positive face, they're faster than when it's a negative face than they're slower in their reaction time, which suggests that they're looking toward the positive face and away from the negative face. We wondered what would happen given these kinds of findings in terms of long-term memory, autobiographical memory. Autobiographical memory is what we remember about ourselves, our person, who we are, our identity, what we've done in life. And we wondered if older people would be more positively biased when they look back over their lives than younger people would be. So do you remember your long-distant pass if you're 60 or 70, more positively than you did when you were 20 or 30, or then a 20 or 30-year-old remembers their past, looking back on it? And we were able to run a study where we actually had the information on what they'd said many years earlier. And we were able to do this with the help of the school sisters of St. Francis, who had completed, for me, at my request in 1987, a very extensive 26-page questionnaire about their physical, social, and emotional lives. So they told us whether they exercised how they ate, what kind of vitamins they took, how they felt, just lots and lots of information. And then in 2002, a doctoral student of mine re-contacted them again and asked them to complete that questionnaire again as they had originally in 1987. Now, she refreshed their memory about the study in 1987, and she also gave them a little pamphlet with a lot of events that occurred in 1987 so that they could see, you know, sort of get themselves back into that frame. But really, we weren't expecting memory to be very good, but rather it was gonna tell us a projection. How did they think they felt, and that we might see differences there? She also did something that we call, it's a quasi-experimental design. She built in an experiment into this. So in two subsets, she instructed what their goal should be while they filled out this questionnaire. And two subgroups of people, she said to them at the beginning and then repeatedly reminded them throughout the questionnaire and text, focus on your feelings, focus on how you feel as you complete this questionnaire, versus focus on how accurate you are. So one group's in the accuracy group, the one focused on getting the information right, and one is focused on how they feel, getting the feelings right. Well, here's the age of finding. In this study, we find that younger and older nuns, interestingly, there's no difference in accuracy in their filling this out. But younger people remember their past more negatively than it actually was. And the older people, the older sisters, remember their past more positively than they actually had described it to us in 1987. Importantly, here's the influence of motivation. Those sisters who were in the emotion reminder group, the emotion prime group, we call it, told more positive stories about what they'd done. Those who were in the accuracy condition, now this is independent of age, right, become more negative. So when people focus on information, focus on accuracy, they're more negative than when they focus on how they feel. I'm gonna show you the results from one last study and close, but I want to leave you with these. I told you early on in my remarks that working memory declines with age, and it clearly does, but most of the research that has been done on working memory has really focused on brightness that is sensory working memory and verbal working memory. Recently, it's been argued that there might be another form of working memory, and that's affective or emotional working memory, holding a feeling state in mind while you work toward that goal. Joe Michaels is a neuroscientist in my laboratory, and he recently developed what I think is an ingenious empirical paradigm to assess affective working memory. What he does is he shows people an image of a negative or positive picture, and then there's a delay where they don't see it. He shows them another image, and then they have to respond by saying which was the first image they saw, more or less intense than the second image, that's the task, so they have to hold this image in mind while through a delay and then seeing another image make a comparison and then respond. For the brightness working memory task, it's about brightness instead, so they see an image, delay, another image, which was brighter, so in this case it would be the umbrella. That's the basic paradigm. He'd run it with younger people and he found that they performed better on negative than positive tasks. He also showed that these two different kinds of working memory are neuraly dissociable. They're functioning, they're undergirded by different parts of the brain. So we run this study with younger and older adults thinking that older adults will perform better on the positive trials than on the negative trials, but not on the brightness working memory task. So this is brightness, and you see old people perform more poorly than younger people do, but there's no main effect for emotion working memory, so older people perform no worse than younger people on the affective working memory trials. But we predicted an interaction effect essentially. We said, what do the older people perform better on the positive ones than the negative ones? And in fact, that's what we find. Older people actually outperform younger people on the trials that are positive images. They do better on this working memory task. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only findings that show a trial, a type of trial, a type of task where older people outperform younger people. Younger people outperform older people on the negative trials. So we see this classic crossover interaction where younger people are attending more to the negative and older to the positive. Just in one second I'm gonna show you just findings from one study suggesting that pursuing emotional goals is really good for your emotional health. The frequency of negative emotions that we've sampled in people in everyday life by having them carry an electronic pager goes down across adulthood. So those of you who are in your 20s and you're hearing day in and day out, this is the best time in your life, it's not true. It gets a lot better. So to conclude, when we started this line of research on memory and attention, we thought that what we were doing was starting two parallel lines of research. We'd done our early work on social preferences and time, and then we were gonna study this line of research that would be relatively independent on cognitive processing and memory. But now we're beginning to think that they're actually linked. That differential to attention to positive information is motivated by goals to maintain positive emotional balance. In other words, these attentional and memorial processes are representing a form of emotion regulation in and of themselves. I wanna be clear that I am not arguing that the well-documented cognitive decline that's observed with aging can be explained away by emotion, motivation, or social context. On the contrary, our data would suggest that they cannot, but rather precisely because there is age-related decline in memory, identifying conditions that are relatively beneficial for performance and the ones that diminish performance becomes ever more important. It seems that older people are focusing on the positive, disattending to the negative, and forgetting it when it is stored. And what we're beginning to think is that we are observing lifetimes of learning where people come to select consciously and subconsciously, socially, emotionally, cognitively, the better parts of life, and disattend to the negative ones. It may be that older people are more vulnerable in some arenas, but that they find ways quite successfully to navigate life. I fear that my time is running out, and I thank you for yours.