Box 4. Older adults’ memory for the positive While the negative can often win out in younger adults’ memories, older adults are more likely to show a focus on the positive (reviewed by Mather & Carstensen, 2005; Carstensen & DeLiema, 2018). This effect is often referred to as the age-related “positivity effect,” and the pattern often is interpreted as arising from age-related changes in motivations, goals and preferences (Carstensen et al., 1999). The positivity effect in older adults’ memories has been observed in a variety of experimental paradigms and for a wide range of stimulus types. Older adults have better memory for positive information over negative information in tasks employing emotional images, word lists, and faces (Reed & Carstensen, 2012), and a meta-analysis revealed that the positivity effect is larger when cognitive processing is not constrained by the task instructions and when the age difference between younger and older adult groups is more extreme (Reed et al., 2014). It has more recently been demonstrated that not only do older adults remember proportionally more positive experiences than younger adults, they also can have an improved ability to focus on the positive aspects of otherwise-challenging life events. In a series of studies, Ford and colleagues demonstrated that, as compared to younger adults, older adults use more positive words to describe past events, even those that were viewed as quite negative at the time (Ford et al., 2016). After experiencing the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing, older age was associated with an increased tendency to focus on the good that had come from the event (the heroism, the city coming together; Ford, DiBiase, & Kensinger, 2018), and 6 months later, older age also was associated with a decreased tendency to focus on the negative aspects of the event (Ford, DiBiase, Ryu, & Kensinger, 2018). A similar pattern was recently shown for reflections on the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic: older age was associated with an increased tendency to focus on the positive aspects (Ford et al., 2021).