Age differences in the relationship between interoception and emotional processing

Abstract

Understanding how bodily signals shape emotional cognition across adulthood is critical for explaining age-related changes in emotional learning and memory. This study investigated age-related differences in interoceptive sensitivity and emotional associative memory. Interoceptive sensitivity was used as an umbrella term to refer to sensitivity to internal bodily signals across interoceptive accuracy, attention, beliefs, and insight, while emotional associative memory was defined as the ability to learn and remember emotional face–name associations. Forty younger (18–39 years) and forty older (60–85 years) adults completed behavioural and self-report interoceptive measures alongside an emotional face–name learning, recall, and recognition paradigm. No significant age differences emerged for interoceptive accuracy, attention, or insight. However, older adults reported greater trust in, and less worry about, bodily sensations, indicating selective changes in interoceptive beliefs. Older adults also showed a robust positivity bias, learning, recalling, and recognising happy face–name pairs more accurately and faster than angry or neutral pairs, whereas younger adults showed uniform performance across emotional conditions. Interoception–emotion relationships differed by age: Young adults’ interoceptive attention was positively associated with learning neutral pairs, while older adults’ interoceptive accuracy correlated with better encoding and recall of angry pairs. These findings demonstrate that age-related differences in emotional associative memory are partly rooted in changes to interoceptive processing and extend Socioemotional Selectivity Theory by identifying interoception as a physiological contributor to the positivity bias in ageing.

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ORCID for Gaby Pfeifer: orcid.org/0000-0002-8737-1255

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