Genç Yetişkin ve Sağlıklı Yaşlıların Altı Temel Duyguyu Tanıma Farklılıkları ve Bu Duygu Durumlarında Oluşturulan Bağlamın Örtük Bellek Üzerindeki Etkisi

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to compare the six basic facial emotional (Anger, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, Surprise and Happiness) expressions in terms of recognition performances of young and healthy elder participants and to investigate the effect of the emotional context created by basic emotions on their implicit memory performances. The research was conducted with 80 young volunteer participants (52 female, 28 male) between 18-25 years old ( =20.86, SD =1.28), and 41 healthy elder volunteer participants (19 female, 21 male) between 65-80 years old ( =69.51, SD =3.44). Young group was composed of university undergraduate students in Hacettepe University and healthy elder group was community-dwelling participants. This study consisted of two phases: encoding and testing. In the encoding phase, participants were conducted two-stage emotion matching task consisting of picture matching and category matching. Also, neutral words were presented with the target face during encoding phase. In the testing phase, participants were conducted Word-Stem Completion Task and Dot-Clearing Task in order to measure their implicit memory performances. The mean accuracy and reaction time were analyzed with 2(Group: Young and Healthy Elder) x 2(Emotion Matching: Picture Matching and Category Matching) x 7(Emotion: Anger, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, Surprise, Happiness and Neutral) Mixed ANOVA in the encoding phase and 2(Group: Young and Healthy Elder) x 7(Emotion: Anger, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, Surprise, Happiness and Neutral) in the testing phase. Results indicated that healthy elder participants showed poorer performance than young participants in terms of both accuracy and reaction time in the emotion matching task. Healthy elders matched happiness, surprise and disgust emotions more accurately with respect to fear, anger and sadness emotions in terms of accuracy. However, they gave the fastest reaction times for fear and longest reaction times for netural condition. Young participants showed better performance for happiness compared to anger and fear in terms of both the accuracy and the reaction time. Priming was shown both in the young and in the healthy elders’ Word Stem Completion Task and Dot Clearing Task performances. However, there was no statistically significant effect of the emotional context on the implicit memory.