Emotional devaluation in ignoring and forgetting as a function of adolescent development

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Emotion and cognition interact to guide behavior.
• Distracting stimuli and to-be-forgotten items are emotionally devaluated.
• The devaluation by inhibition hypothesis explains these effects.
• Developmental changes in adolescence may modulate this interplay.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate how development, particularly adolescence, affects the cognition-emotion interplay.
• Examine the role of inhibitory control and affective processing changes during adolescence.
• Assess the devaluation effect in younger adolescents, older adolescents, and young adults.

Main Methods:

• Combined selective attention task with faces and selective memory (directed forgetting) task with words.
• Included a pleasantness evaluation task.
• Compared three age groups: younger adolescents, older adolescents, and young adults.

Main Results:

• Younger adolescents showed poorer attention accuracy, lower word recognition, and a weaker directed forgetting effect, indicating less efficient inhibitory control.
• All age groups exhibited similar emotional devaluation of distractor faces and to-be-forgotten words.
• Findings suggest the forgetting devaluation effect is robust across these age groups.

Conclusions:

• The study supports the robustness of the forgetting devaluation effect, replicating previous findings.
• Results do not fully support an inhibition-based account of these devaluation effects.
• Adolescent development influences inhibitory control but not the forgetting devaluation effect itself.