The negativity bias is eliminated in older adults: Age-related reduction in event-related brain potentials associated with evaluative categorization (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1998
Negative information tends to influence evaluations more strongly than comparably extreme positive information. To test whether this negativity bias operates at the evaluative categorization stage, the authors recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs), which are more sensitive to the evaluative categorization than the response output stage, as participants viewed positive, negative, and neutral pictures. Results revealed larger amplitude late positive brain potentials during the evaluative categorization of (a) positive and negative stimuli as compared with neutral stimuli and (b) negative as compared with positive stimuli, even though both were equally probable, evaluatively extreme, and arousing. These results provide support for the hypothesis that the negativity bias in affective processing occurs as early as the initial categorization into valence classes.
Brain responses to emotional images related to cognitive ability in older adults
Psychology and Aging, 2013
Older adults have been shown to exhibit a positivity effect in processing of emotional stimuli, seemingly focusing more on positive than negative information. Whether this reflects purposeful changes or an unintended side-effect of declining cognitive abilities is unclear. For the present study older adults displaying a wide range of cognitive abilities completed measures of attention, visual and verbal memory, executive functioning, and processing speed, as well as a socioemotional measure of time perspective. Regression analyses examined the ability of these variables to predict neural responsivity to select emotional stimuli as measured with the late positive potential (LPP), an event-related brain potential (ERP). Stronger cognitive functioning was associated with higher LPP amplitude in response to negative images (i.e., greater processing). This does not support a voluntary avoidance of negative information processing in older adults for this particular measure of attentional allocation. A model is proposed to reconcile this finding with the extant literature that has demonstrated positivity effects in measures of later, controlled attentional allocation.
Is emotion processing affected by advancing age? An event-related brain potential study
Brain Research, 2006
The recognition of emotions is presumably affected by advancing age, which is known from subjective reports and recognition tasks. To differentiate perception from executive function more clearly, the discrimination of emotions was investigated with event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from 21 electrodes in 14 elderly (ages 59-74) and 13 younger participants (ages 30-40) triggered by a rapid (3 Hz) serial visual presentation (RSVP) of high and low arousing pictures. Additionally, affective ratings of valence and arousal of a representative sample of 54 pictures were obtained. An early posterior negativity (EPN) as an index of early emotion discrimination was analyzed in an early (168-232 ms) and a late (232-296 ms) time window. Both groups showed an EPN associated with pictures of high emotional arousal. However, the EPN was slightly delayed in elderly participants. Thus, the affective modulation of the EPN was reduced in elderly subjects in the early time window, but not in the late time window. Ratings of valence or arousal did not differ between groups.
Brain Processing of Emotional Scenes in Aging: Effect of Arousal and Affective Context
PLoS ONE, 2014
Research on emotion showed an increase, with age, in prevalence of positive information relative to negative ones. This effect is called positivity effect. From the cerebral analysis of the Late Positive Potential (LPP), sensitive to attention, our study investigated to which extent the arousal level of negative scenes is differently processed between young and older adults and, to which extent the arousal level of negative scenes, depending on its value, may contextually modulate the cerebral processing of positive (and neutral) scenes and favor the observation of a positivity effect with age. With this aim, two negative scene groups characterized by two distinct arousal levels (high and low) were displayed into two separate experimental blocks in which were included positive and neutral pictures. The two blocks only differed by their negative pictures across participants, as to create two negative global contexts for the processing of the positive and neutral pictures. The results show that the relative processing of different arousal levels of negative stimuli, reflected by LPP, appears similar between the two age groups. However, a lower activity for negative stimuli is observed with the older group for both tested arousal levels. The processing of positive information seems to be preserved with age and is also not contextually impacted by negative stimuli in both younger and older adults. For neutral stimuli, a significantly reduced activity is observed for older adults in the contextual block of low-arousal negative stimuli. Globally, our study reveals that the positivity effect is mainly due to a modulation, with age, in processing of negative stimuli, regardless of their arousal level. It also suggests that processing of neutral stimuli may be modulated with age, depending on negative context in which they are presented to. These age-related effects could contribute to justify the differences in emotional preference with age.
2012
Some studies have suggested that the memory advantage for negative emotional information over neutral information ("negativity effect") is reduced in aging. Besides the fact that most findings are based on immediate retrieval, the neural underpinnings of long-term emotional memory in aging have so far not been investigated. To address these issues, we assessed recognition of neutral and negative scenes after 1-and 3-week retention intervals in younger and older adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We further used an event-related design in order to disentangle successful, false, and true recognition. This study revealed four key findings: (1) increased retention interval induced an increased rate of false recognitions for negative scenes, canceling out the negativity effect (present for hit rates only) on discrimination in both younger and older adults; (2) in younger, but not older, adults, reduced activity of the medial temporal lobe was observed over time for neutral scenes, but not for negative scenes, where stable or increased activity was seen;
Positivity effect in aging: Evidence for the primacy of positive responses to emotional ambiguity
Older compared to younger adults show greater amygdala activity to positive emotions, and are more likely to interpret emotionally ambiguous stimuli (e.g., surprised faces) as positive. While some evidence suggests this positivity effect results from a relatively slow, top-down mechanism, others suggest it emerges from early, bottom-up processing. The amygdala is a key node in rapid, bottom-up processing and patterns of amygdala activity over time (e.g., habituation) can shed light on the mechanisms underlying the positivity effect. Younger and older adults passively viewed neutral and surprised faces in an MRI. Only in older adults, we found that amygdala habituation was associated with the tendency to interpret surprised faces as positive or negative (valence bias), where a more positive bias was associated with greater habituation. Interestingly, although a positive bias in younger adults was associated with slower reaction times, consistent with an initial negativity hypothesis ...
Are Age Effects in Positivity Influenced by the Valence of Distractors?
PLOS ONE, 2015
An age-related 'positivity' effect has been identified, in which older adults show an information-processing bias towards positive emotional items in attention and memory. In the present study, we examined this positivity bias by using a novel paradigm in which emotional and neutral distractors were presented along with emotionally valenced targets. Thirty-five older and 37 younger adults were asked during encoding to attend to emotional targets paired with distractors that were either neutral or opposite in valence to the target. Pupillary responses were recorded during initial encoding as well as a later incidental recognition task. Memory and pupillary responses for negative items were not affected by the valence of distractors, suggesting that positive distractors did not automatically attract older adults' attention while they were encoding negative targets. Additionally, the pupil dilation to negative items mediated the relation between age and positivity in memory. Overall, memory and pupillary responses provide converging support for a cognitive control account of positivity effects in late adulthood and suggest a link between attentional processes and the memory positivity effect.
Age-related decline in emotional perspective-taking: Its effect on the late positive potential
Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 2018
Aging is associated with changes in cognitive and affective functioning, which likely shape older adults' social cognition. As the neural and psychological mechanisms underlying age differences in social abilities remain poorly understood, the present study aims to extend the research in this field. To this purpose, younger (n = 30; M age = 26.6), middle-aged (n = 30; M age = 48.4), and older adults (n = 29; M age = 64.5) performed a task designed to assess affective perspective-taking, during an EEG recording. In this task, participants decided whether a target facial expression of emotion (FEE) was congruent or incongruent with that of a masked intervener of a previous scenario, which portrayed a neutral or an emotional scene. Older adults showed worse performance in comparison to the other groups. Regarding electrophysiological results, while younger and middle-aged adults showed higher late positive potentials (LPPs) after FEEs congruent with previous scenarios than after incongruent FEEs, older adults had similar amplitudes after both. This insensitivity of older adults' LPPs in differentiating congruent from incongruent emotional context-target FEE may be related to their difficulty in generating information about others' inner states and using that information in social interactions.
Personal relevance modulates the positivity bias in recall of emotional pictures in older adults
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2008
There is increasing evidence that older adults experience fewer negative feelings (Gross et al., 1997), dissipate negative affect better (Carstensen, Pasupathi, Mayr, & Nesselroade, 2000), and are better at regulating negative moods (Charles, Reynolds, & Gatz, 2001), as compared with younger adults. This pattern fits well with socioemotional selectivity theory (SST; Carstensen, 1995), which postulates that as people age and perceive their remaining life to be increasingly limited, their goals shift from novelty seeking to emotion regulation, defined as the maintenance of a positive affective state. Consistent with SST, a growing number of studies have shown that, as compared with young adults, older adults preferentially attend to positive over both negative and neutral information. For example, older adults are slower to localize a dot probe when it is preceded by a face with a negative (e.g., angry) expression and faster when it is preceded by a face with a positive (e.g., happy) expression (Mather & Carstensen, 2003). Older adults also do not sustain attention to negative stimuli (Rösler et al., 2005). These studies suggest that emotional content influences cognitive functions, particularly in older adults. Studies have also shown that emotion (both positive and negative) can boost memory in younger (Cahill & McGaugh, 1995) and older (Denburg, Buchanan, Tranel, & Adolphs, 2003) adults. Although studies of attention support the possibility of a positivity bias in older adults, evidence for a corresponding bias in memory has been variable. Enhanced memory for positive material has been demonstrated in older adults on tests of autobiographical memories (e.g.,
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2010
Studies on aging and emotion suggest an increase in reported positive affect, a processing bias of positive over negative information, as well as increasingly adaptive regulation in response to negative events with advancing age. These findings imply that older individuals evaluate information differently, resulting in lowered reactivity to, and/or faster recovery from, negative information, while maintaining more positive responding to