Aging and emotional memory: Cognitive mechanisms underlying the positivity effect.

Younger adults tend to remember negative information better than positive or neutral information (negativity bias). The negativity bias is reduced in aging, with older adults occasionally exhibiting superior memory for positive, as opposed to negative or neutral, information (positivity bias). Two experiments with younger (N=24 in Experiment 1, N=25 in Experiment 2; age range: 18-35 years) and older adults (N=24 in both experiments; age range:...