Emotional Memory Across the Adult Lifespan

Dr. Kensinger graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1998, with a joint degree in Psychology and Biology. She pursued her Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute predoctoral fellowship and a National Science Foundation dissertation award. After receipt of her Ph.D. in 2003, she held a postdoctoral research position at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital, supported by fellowships from the Massachusetts Biomedical Research Corporation and the National Institutes of Mental Health. In 2006, she joined the faculty of Boston College as an Assistant Professor of Psychology, where she heads the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience laboratory. Dr. Kensinger has received numerous awards for her research and teaching, including young investigator research awards from the American Federation for Aging Research and the Dana Foundation. She is Associate Editor of the journal Cognition and Emotion, and she sits on the editorial boards of Memory and Cognition and Journal of Experimental Psychology. She has authored or co-authored over 60 research articles and book chapters, and she has been an invited symposium speaker at many universities as well as at national and international conferences.

"Emotional memory is a fundamentally important topic that is generating a great deal of exciting research. Elizabeth Kensinger has made important contributions to this rapidly growing literature, and in her scholarly yet highly readable book, she provides a comprehensive synthesis of the key findings and ideas at the forefront of the field. Emotional Memory Across the Adult Lifespan is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the psychology or cognitive neuroscience of memory and emotion." - Daniel L. Schacter, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Seven Sins of Memory.

• Part 1. Introduction and Background. 1. Emotion, Memory, and Their Interactions. 2. The Neurobiology of Emotion and Memory. 3. Methods for Investigating Emotion-Memory Interactions. Part 2. Emotional Memory in Young Adults. 4. Emotion’s Modulation of Implicit Memory. 5. Emotion’s Influence on Working Memory. 6. Emotion and Long-Term Memory Enhancements. 7. Aspects of Memory Enhanced by Emotion. 8. Emotion-Induced Memory Trade-offs. 9. Influences of Valence and Arousal on Emotional Memory. 10. Individual Differences in Young Adults’ Emotional Memories. Part 3. Emotional Memory in Older Adults. 11. Cognitive and Neural Changes with Advancing Age. 12. Emotional Processing in Old Age. 13. Aging and Emotional Working Memory. 14. When Aging Influences Effects of Emotion on Long-Term Memory. 15. Age-Related Positivity Biases. 16. Emotional Memory in Alzheimer’s Disease. 17. Summary and Conclusions.