Our study investigated how negative emotions influence associative memory and memory coherence, and how these results differ between a population of young adults (18-35) and older adults (60-85). According to the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (Carstensen et al., 1999), motivational shifts lead older adults to favor positive over negative information in attention, memory, and emotional experience, compared to younger adults. Given this positivity bias and age-related difference in encoding and retrieval, our goal was to understand how the quality of memory and its emotional impact is affected with age. To test this, we created a set of 20 neutral and 20 negative events comprised of a scene, a face, and an object. After encoding the events, participants took part in an associative memory task where they were asked to find pairs of previously encoded items. As expected, older participants demonstrated reduced associative memory performance compared to young adults, but there was no evidence that emotion played a role in this relationship. We also did not replicate previous findings of memory coherence, as our results showed no difference in dependency between age groups nor emotional conditions. Finally, we found that older adults tend to rate stimuli higher in arousal, negativity, and positivity, supporting the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory. Our results, therefore, did not fully align with our hypotheses about age-related changes in emotional associative memory and memory coherence.