The role of emotional context and strategy choice in associative memory in young and older adults

Emotion plays a critical role in shaping memory processes, influencing encoding, consolidation and retrieval. While young adults tend to exhibit enhanced memory for negative stimuli, older adults show a preference for positive stimuli. However, forming and retrieving novel associations—particularly for unrelated information—poses a greater challenge for older adults than recalling single items. Although deep encoding strategies can enhance associative memory, older adults often do not spontaneously use them. The extent to which emotional context influences strategy selection and subsequent associative memory remains underexplored, particularly across age groups. This study investigated how emotional contexts (negative, neutral, positive) influence strategy selection (mental imagery vs. repetition) and subsequent free and cued recall of neutral word pairs. 32 young and 32 older adults encoded word pairs while viewing emotional and neutral background images and later completed free and cued recall tasks. Emotional context did not affect strategy choice. However, there was a trend toward a main effect of emotional context on free recall performance. Moreover, emotional context significantly influenced cued recall, relative to neutral context, but only when participants used mental imagery, irrespective of age. Specifically, cued recall was lower in negative and positive contexts compared to neutral, suggesting that emotional contexts disrupted the execution of mental imagery, impairing associative binding in both age groups. In contrast, choosing the repetition strategy resulted in poorer cued recall in the negative than in the positive context. This study offers new insights that expand our understanding of how emotion influences associative memory.