Thinking about a limited future enhances the positivity of younger and older adults’ recall: Support for socioemotional selectivity theory (original) (raw)
Related papers
Psychology and aging, 2016
According to socioemotional selectivity theory, older adults' emotional well-being stems from having a limited future time perspective that motivates them to maximize well-being in the "here and now." Presumably, then, older adults' time horizons are associated with emotional competencies that boost positive affect and dampen negative affect, but little research has addressed this. Using a U.S. adult life-span sample (N = 3,933; 18-93 years), we found that a 2-factor model of future time perspective (future opportunities; limited time) fit the data better than a 1-factor model. Through middle age, people perceived the life-span hourglass as half full-they focused more on future opportunities than limited time. Around Age 60, the balance changed to increasingly perceiving the life-span hourglass as half empty-they focused less on future opportunities and more on limited time, even after accounting for perceived health, self-reported decision-making ability, and reti...
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.
Prospective memory, emotional valence and ageing
Cognition & Emotion, 2010
Emotional factors have been found to be an important influence on memory. The current study investigated the influence of emotional salience and age on a laboratory measure of prospective memory (PM); Virtual Week. Thirty young and 30 old adults completed Virtual Week, in which the emotional salience of the tasks at encoding was manipulated to be positive, negative or neutral in content. For event-based, but not time-based tasks, positivity enhancement in both age groups was seen, with a greater number of positive PM tasks being performed relative to neutral tasks. There was no negativity enhancement effect. Older adults showed generally poorer levels of PM, but they also demonstrated greater beneficial effects of positive valence compared to young. These effects of emotion on PM accuracy do not appear to reflect the retrospective component of the task as a different pattern of emotion effects was seen on the recall of PM content. Results indicate that older adults' difficulties in prospective remembering can be reduced where the tasks to be remembered are positive.
The Theory Behind the Age-Related Positivity Effect
Frontiers in Psychology, 2012
The "positivity effect" refers to an age-related trend that favors positive over negative stimuli in cognitive processing. Relative to their younger counterparts, older people attend to and remember more positive than negative information. Since the effect was initially identified and the conceptual basis articulated (Mather and Carstensen, 2005) scores of independent replications and related findings have appeared in the literature. Over the same period, a number of investigations have failed to observe age differences in the cognitive processing of emotional material. When findings are considered in theoretical context, a reliable pattern of evidence emerges that helps to refine conceptual tenets. In this article we articulate the operational definition and theoretical foundations of the positivity effect and review the empirical evidence based on studies of visual attention, memory, decision making, and neural activation. We conclude with a discussion of future research directions with emphasis on the conditions where a focus on positive information may benefit and/or impair cognitive performance in older people.
Psychological reports, 2014
Compared to younger adults, older adults attend more to positive stimuli, a positivity effect. Older adults have limited time horizons, and they focus on maintaining positive affect, whereas younger adults have unlimited time horizons, and they focus on acquiring knowledge and developing skills. Time horizons were manipulated by asking participants (66 young adults, M age = 20.5 yr., SD = 1.2) to think that their lives would end in three years. Some participants focused on what they would do in these three years (life focus), whereas others focused on the fact that they would die in three years (death focus). Attentional biases to facial expressions of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust were measured. Participants viewed 20 slides including pairings of a happy face with each of the negative emotions. The dependent measure was the relative attention paid to the faces on each slide. Participants in the experimental conditions exhibited a positivity effect compared to partici...
The role of automatic and controlled processes in the positivity effect for older adults
Background The positivity effect can be defined as an age-related attentional preference for positive information. The age differences are due to an attentional bias in which the young focused more intently on the negative stimuli, whereas the older attend to capture positive stimuli. There are two cognitive-emotional models that can explain the positivity effect: the socio-emotional selectivity theory (SST) and the dynamic integration theory (DIT). The SST states that in the older the positivity effect is related to controlled attentional processes, on the opposite, the DIT states that the positivity effect is related to automatic processes. Aims The main aim of the present study was to examine automatic and controlled attentional orienting of young and older adults in the positivity effect. Methods To reach these goals and to verify the generalization of the previous results, we used two experimental paradigms: the dot-probe task and the visual discrimination task with facial stimuli with positive (happy and surprise), negative (fair and angry) and neutral emotional expressions. 50 older and 35 young adults participated in this study. Results The older adults reacted faster to positive emotions than neutral or negative ones. They had similar RTs for the three types of emotions in both automatic and controlled attention. Discussion The findings are discussed in light of SST and DIT theories. Conclusions This study confirms the positivity effect for the older subjects and support the idea that both automatic and controlled processes play a key role in this effect.
Memory, 2011
This study investigated whether the age-related positivity effect strengthens specific event details in autobiographical memory. Participants retrieved past events or imagined future events in response to neutral or emotional cue words. Older adults rated each kind of event more positively than younger adults, demonstrating an age-related positivity effect. We next administered a source memory test. Participants were given the same cue words and tried to retrieve the previously generated event and its source (past or future). Accuracy on this source test should depend on the recollection of specific details about the earlier generated events, providing a more objective measure of those details than subjective ratings. We found that source accuracy was greater for positive than negative future events in both age groups, suggesting that positive future events were more detailed. In contrast, valence did not affect source accuracy for past events in either age group, suggesting that positive and negative past events were equally detailed. Although ageing can bias people to focus on positive aspects of experience, this bias does not appear to strengthen the availability of details for positive relative to negative past events.
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.,