Preferring positivity : age differences in judgments of learning and memory for emotionally-valenced words (original) (raw)
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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.
Response bias in "remembering" emotional stimuli: A new perspective on age differences
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2008
Older adults sometimes show a recall advantage for emotionally positive, rather than neutral or negative, stimuli (S. T. . In contrast, younger adults respond "old" and "remember" more often to negative materials in recognition tests. For younger adults, both effects are due to response bias changes rather than to enhanced memory accuracy (S. Dougal & C. M. . We presented older and younger adults with emotional and neutral stimuli in a remember-know paradigm. Signal-detection and model-based analyses showed that memory accuracy did not differ for the neutral, negative, and positive stimuli, and that "remember" responses did not reflect the use of recollection. However, both age groups showed large and significant response bias effects of emotion: Younger adults tended to say "old" and "remember" more often in response to negative words than to positive and neutral words, whereas older adults responded "old" and "remember" more often to both positive and negative words than to neutral stimuli.
Psychology and Aging, 2005
Some authors argue for a memory advantage of older adults for positively toned material. To investigate the contribution of selective processing to a positivity effect, the authors investigated young (n ϭ 72, aged 18 to 31) and older (n ϭ 72, aged 64 to 75) adults' memory for emotionally toned words using a multitrial paradigm that compares performance for heterogeneous (mixed valence) and homogeneous (single valence) lists. Regarding the age comparison, there was no evidence for an aging bias favoring positive material. Moreover, older adults' memory was less affected by emotion-based processing prioritization. Although there was no support for age-specific processing biases in memory for emotionally toned words, the findings are consistent with proposals that negative information receives processing priority in some contexts. Possible limits to the generalizability of the present findings (e.g., to nonverbal material) are discussed.
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.
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.
Aging and emotional memory: the forgettable nature of negative images for older adults
Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2003
Two studies examined age differences in recall and recognition memory for positive, negative, and neutral stimuli. In Study 1, younger, middle-aged, and older adults were shown images on a computer screen and, after a distraction task, were asked first to recall as many as they could and then to identify previously shown images from a set of old and new ones. The relative number of negative images compared with positive and neutral images recalled decreased with each successively older age group. Recognition memory showed a similar decrease with age in the relative memory advantage for negative pictures. In Study 2, the largest age differences in recall and recognition accuracy were also for the negative images. Findings are consistent with socioemotional selectivity theory, which posits greater investment in emotion regulation with age.
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.
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.
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.,