AGING AND THE EFFECTS OF AFFECTIVE AND FACTUAL FOCUS ON SOURCE MONITORING AND RECALL

Pairs of young and elderly Ss participated in a short play and were th en instructed to talk about factual or affective aspects of the play o r to talk about the play without any particular focus suggested. In bo th the affective and control condition, older adults' ability to discr iminate what they had said from what the other person had said was poo rer than that of young adults. In contrast, when induced to focus on t he factual content of the events, older Ss' source monitoring improved , and the age difference was reduced. The pattern was similar when Ss' ability to discriminate what they had said from what they had thought was examined. Furthermore, affective focus lowered the overall level of recall for both young and older Ss and led older Ss, in particular, to introduce more elaborations into their recall. The possibility tha t age differences in remembering content and source are related to typ e of focus is discussed.