Effects of emotions on cognitive and metacognitive aspects of cognition during aging: Insights from arithmetic

A huge amount of research documented age-related changes in emotion-cognition interaction during adulthood. Older adults’ cognition is much less influenced by negative emotions than young adults’; the reverse is true for positive emotions. To further our understanding of most influenced mechanisms by emotions during aging, we ran a series of studies investigating domain-specific (strategic) and domain-general (metacognitive) processes in the domain of arithmetic. Data show that (a) negative emotions influenced both domain-specific and domain-general aspects of arithmetic performance, and (b) some effects of emotions on cognitive and metacognitive processes are similar and other are different in young and older adults. All in all, these data suggest that it is important to investigate the role of emotions on cognition and metacognition, how this role changes during adulthood, and suggest key conceptual and methodological approaches to investigate this role.