title: Memory for faces with emotional expressions in Alzheimer's disease and healthy older participants: positivity effect is not only due to familiarity.
abstract: Young individuals better memorize initially seen faces with emotional rather than neutral expressions. Healthy older participants and Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients show better memory for faces with positive expressions. The socioemotional selectivity theory postulates that this positivity effect in memory reflects a general age-related preference for positive stimuli, subserving emotion regulation. Another explanation might be that older participants use compensatory strategies, often considering happy faces as previously seen. The question about the existence of this effect in tasks not permitting such compensatory strategies is still open. Thus, we compared the performance of healthy participants and AD patients for positive, neutral, and negative faces in such tasks. Healthy older participants and AD patients showed a positivity effect in memory, but there was no difference between emotional and neutral faces in young participants. Our results suggest that the positivity effect in memory is not entirely due to the sense of familiarity for smiling faces.
authors.affiliation: a Institut de Psychologie, Laboratoire d'Etude de Mécanismes Cognitifs (EMC) , Université Lumière Lyon 2 , Lyon , France.
authors.forename: Alina-Alexandra
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Sava
authors.affiliation: b INSERM U1028 - CNRS UMR5292 , Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon , Bron , France.|c Hospices civils de Lyon, CM2R , Hôpital gériatrique des Charpennes , Villeurbane , France.
authors.forename: Pierre
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Krolak-Salmon
authors.affiliation: c Hospices civils de Lyon, CM2R , Hôpital gériatrique des Charpennes , Villeurbane , France.
authors.forename: Floriane
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Delphin-Combe
authors.affiliation: a Institut de Psychologie, Laboratoire d'Etude de Mécanismes Cognitifs (EMC) , Université Lumière Lyon 2 , Lyon , France.
authors.forename: Morgane
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cloarec
authors.affiliation: a Institut de Psychologie, Laboratoire d'Etude de Mécanismes Cognitifs (EMC) , Université Lumière Lyon 2 , Lyon , France.
authors.forename: Hanna
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Chainay
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000523:psychology*; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D000066499:Facial Recognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; emotional expressions; familiarity; healthy aging; positivity effect in memory