Mood, motivation, and misinformation: Aging and affective state influences on memory (original) (raw)
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Aging and motivated cognition: The positivity effect in attention and memory
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2005
As people get older, they experience fewer negative emotions. Strategic processes in older adults' emotional attention and memory might play a role in this variation with age. Older adults show more emotionally gratifying memory distortion for past choices and autobiographical information than younger adults do. In addition, when shown stimuli that vary in affective valence, positive items account for a larger proportion of older adults' subsequent memories than those of younger adults. This positivity effect in older adults' memories seems to be due to their greater focus on emotion regulation and to be implemented by cognitive control mechanisms that enhance positive and diminish negative information. These findings suggest that both cognitive abilities and motivation contribute to older adults' improved emotion regulation.
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
Age-related differences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 years
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001
Positive and negative affect, measured by the Bradburn Affect Balance Scale, were studied in a longitudinal sample spanning from 1971 to 1994. The sample (N = 2,804) represented 4 generations of families. Linear trend analyses compared generations over time for positive and negative affect and also examined the possible influences of neuroticism and extraversion on initial levels of affect and patterns of change in affect. Negative affect decreased with age for all generations, although the rate was attenuated among the oldest adults. Higher neuroticism scores also attenuated the decrease in negative affect across time. For positive affect, the younger and middle-aged adults showed marked stability, but the older group evidenced a small decrease over time. Higher levels of extraversion were related to more stability in positive affect.
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.
The influence of emotional valence on age differences in early processing and memory
Psychology and Aging, 2006
This study examined young and older adults' attentional biases and subsequent incidental recognition memory for distracting positive, negative, and neutral words. Younger adults were more distracted by negative stimuli than by positive or neutral stimuli and they correctly recognized more negative than positive words. Older adults, however, attended equally to all stimuli yet showed reliable recognition only for positive words. Thus, although an attentional bias towards negative words carries over into recognition performance for younger adults, older adults' bias appears to be limited to remembering positive information.
2018
Many changes occur with age, including changes in emotion regulation and memory. The Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (Carstensen, 2006) posits that older adults tend to be more concerned with emotionally meaningful goals and therefore experience what is called the “positivity effect” with age. The positivity effect results in a bias in attention and memory towards positive stimuli over neutral and negative stimuli. Age-related changes also arise in memory monitoring, specifically in Judgments of Learning (JOLs), when individuals learn emotional words. We examined the presence of the positivity effect in memory and JOLs for positive, negative, and neutral words. Younger and older adults (N=83) viewed words of each valence category and made immediate JOLs, followed by a two-alternative forced choice recognition memory task. The positivity effect was not supported in number correct on the memory task, but it was suggested by the number of positive lures incorrectly identified by olde...
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 ...
Age Differences in Positive and Negative Affect
2016
In cross-sectional and longitudinal samples from the Berlin Aging Study, fellow researchers and I examined performance-based and self-evaluative indicators of functioning in two realms as predictors of individual differences and intraindividual changes in positive and negative affect. Cross-sectional and longitudinal structural equation models suggested that performance-based indicators (level of social involvement and test intelligence) were associated with positive affect, but not with negative affect. Evaluative indicators (self-reported quality of social life and mental fitness) showed stronger relations to negative affect than to positive affect. The present evidence provides an explanation for the differential stability of positive versus negative affect in old age: Positive affect may decline because it requires objective competencies, which seem to decrease in old age. Negative affect may remain stable because it is associated with self-evaluations, which seem to change less...
Quality of Life Research, 2018
Purpose Prioritizing positivity (PP) has been presented as an effective mechanism to increase positive emotions and reduce negative emotions. The current study sought to explore the role of age as a moderator and identify selected situations facilitating the likelihood of routinely experiencing positive and negative emotions. Methods This mixed methods study consisted of 604 adults between 17 and 87 years who completed prioritizing positivity (PP) scale, positive and negative affect scale (PANAS), and demographic data. Aside from the study questionnaires, a subsample of 223 participants was presented with two open questions. 1037 responses to these two questions comprised the data for content analysis. Results PP was found to be associated with increasing positive emotions in old adulthood, but not in young adulthood, and more with decreasing negative emotions in young adulthood than in old adulthood. Content analysis revealed that interpersonal interaction is critical in both increasing positive and reducing negative emotions, across age groups. However, young adults were more likely to prioritize pleasurable activities as triggers of positive emotions. Older adults focused on avoiding unfulfilling situations, due to the negative emotions that they trigger. Conclusion Integrating both qualitative and quantitative findings elucidates the role of daily routine situations and activities in the management of positive and negative emotions across the lifespan. PP was shown to be of significant emotional value for younger as well as for older adults, though for different reasons. For younger adults, PP serves as a potential 'buffer' to balance negative emotions related to daily stresses and hassles characterizing this life stage, whereas for older adults it serves as a mechanism to boost life's little pleasures on a daily basis based on the acknowledgment of one's limited time ahead.