title: Influences of Age and Emotion on Source Guessing: Are Older Adults More Likely to Show Fear-Relevant Illusory Correlations?
abstract: The present study investigates age differences in the vulnerability to illusory correlations between fear-relevant stimuli and threatening information.
  
  
  
  Younger and older adults saw pictures of threatening snakes and nonthreatening fish, paired with threatening and nonthreatening context information ("poisonous" and "nonpoisonous") with a null contingency between animal type and poisonousness. In a source monitoring test, participants were required to remember whether an animal was associated with poisonousness or nonpoisonousness. Illusory correlations were implicitly measured via a multinomial model. One advantage of this approach is that memory and guessing processes can be assessed independently. An illusory correlation would be reflected in a higher probability of guessing that a snake rather than a fish was poisonous if the poisonousness of the animal was not remembered.
  
  
  
  Older adults showed evidence of illusory correlations in source guessing while younger adults did not; instead they showed evidence of probability matching. Moreover, snake fear was associated with increased vulnerability to illusory correlations in older adults.
  
  
  
  The findings confirm that older adults are more susceptible to fear-relevant illusory correlations than younger adults.
authors: Department of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany. miriam.meyer@hhu.de.
authors: Miriam Magdalena
authors: MM
authors: Meyer
authors: Department of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany.
authors: Axel
authors: A
authors: Buchner
authors: Department of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany.
authors: Raoul
authors: R
authors: Bell
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D005239:Fear / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Covariation bias; Illusory correlations; Multinomial model; Schemata; Source monitoring