The Science Of Emotion

Kaoru Nashiro, USC Davis School Ph.D. candidate, wins an APA Div 20 award
By Jonathan Riggs

     It’s tempting to think about aging as a time of losses, both internal and external. Kaoru Nashiro, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at the USC Davis School of Gerontology, chose instead to focus on aging as a time of opportunity, and earned an American Psychological Association Div 20 award for her research.
      “Her perspective is unusual, in that rather than focusing on age-related deficits, she is focusing on specific strengths in learning that older adults have, and trying to capitalize on those strengths to improve learning more generally,” Dr. Mara Mather, Nashiro’s mentor at the USC Davis School said. “Understanding how learning changes in aging and Alzheimer’s disease is the question that drives all of her work, and she is deeply committed to research on aging.”
     “Getting older is not all about negative changes—there are functions that are well preserved in older adults,” Nashiro said. “The investigation of preservations is as important as that of declines.” Her award-winning research examined how emotional content affected learning in younger and older adults. Participants were tested on a pattern of faces changing between unhappy and happy expressions, with a control image—a face with eyeglasses—included. Nashiro found that a change towards negative content (the unhappy expressions) impaired learning for older adults, while younger adults were unaffected. The flip side of this was that the older adults showed a distinct advantage in learning reversals when the change occurred towards happy expressions.
     “This line of research addresses the important question of how age differences in emotional attention and memory can be harnessed such that older adults’ memories are enhanced for non-emotional material,” Mather said.
     Originally from Okinawa, Japan—renowned for one of the highest proportions of centenarians in the world—Nashiro came to the United States to study psychology and found herself fascinated by the field of gerontology. When Nashiro heard that she won this award for her research, she said she felt “surprised and honored,” and she thanked her advisor Dr. Mara Mather, the entire Mather Lab team (including lab manager Lin Nga), and all of the research participants: “Healthy Mind” volunteers, Kingsley Manor Retirement Community residents and USC students.
     Continuing to research solutions for maximizing the cognitive performance of older adults, Nashiro remains passionate about her work.
      “The more I study the subject, it seems to raise more questions than it answers. This is what makes research exciting and interesting,” she said. “I like the fact that my research focuses on positive aspects of aging. I enjoy sharing good news about getting older with older adults.”

If you are interested in being a study subject, please visit http://healthyminds.matherlab.com.