Picture This! Item Frames, Together with Depressive Affect and Humility, Differentially Affect the Memory...

We compared how young and older adults' memory self-efficacy (MSE) responded to changes in item framing and examined how MSE relates to depressive affect, humility, and objective memory abilities in these two age groups.

Ninety-one young and eighty-five older adults completed the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression scale, the Humility Inventory-15 and a memory self-efficacy questionnaire that contained 27 items from the Memory Assessment Clinics-Self-Report Scale worded positively, neutrally or negatively. They then took an objective memory test.

Older adults' MSE was affected by item framing with neutrally worded items resulting in higher MSE than positively or negatively worded items. In contrast, the MSE of young adults was impervious to framing effects. Regardless of question framing, increased depressive affect related to lower MSE across both age groups, whereas higher humility counterintuitively predicted higher MSE in young, but not older, adults.

Together, our results support past research and suggest new avenues for understanding the many factors that influence the subjective memory of young and older adults. Based on our findings, we recommend that researchers and practitioners utilize positively worded questionnaire items to evaluate MSE given that this approach was least vulnerable to depressive affect and resulted in the most accurate memory self-reports.