Preliminary evidence that remembering together can help younger adults recall the positive

Emotional information is often more likely to be recalled than neutral information. Among emotional information, there can also be valence biases in memory, with negative content remembered better than positive content or vice-versa. With regard to whether collaborating with others enhances negative memory biases or positive ones, findings in young adults are mixed. Moreover, little is known about how collaboration affects valence biases in older adults' memories, even though it is well documented that older adults often show positive memory biases on individual recall tasks. The present study examined the effect of collaborative retrieval on young and older adults' valence memory biases, by assigning young and older adults to individual-recall or collaborative-recall conditions prior to completing an individual recall task. In the collaborative recall condition, groups were composed of same age-group partners, all young adults or all older adults. Importantly, the recall tasks gave participants three category labels to recall at once, to cue memories in a manner that encouraged the intermixing of differently valenced content. Collaborative retrieval enhanced young adults' memories for all valences, but enhanced memory for positive valence to the greatest extent, resulting in a strong positive memory bias after collaboration. Older adults showed a positive memory bias regardless of whether or not they collaborated. These results emphasize that the positive memory biases typically seen in older adults can be elicited in young adults, if they collaborate with one another.