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 participants in the control condition, although some results suggested that this effect was weaker in the death focus condition than in the life focus condition.

Identical trait labels may be understood differently in thinking about self and in thinking about others. Specifically, when making self-judgments, individuals define traits primarily in terms of unobservable manifestations, e.g., how one feels. However, in making other-judgments, particularly in making judgments about relatively unfamiliar others, individuals define traits primarily in terms of observable manifestations, e.g., how one looks. This prediction was tested in three experiments (Exp. 1: N = 96, Polish undergraduates including 19 men, 77 women; Exp. 2: N = 96, U.S. undergraduates including 18 men, 78 women; Exp. 3: N = 74, Polish undergraduates including 18 men, 56 women). Participants were asked to perform a generic trait judgment task followed by a specific trait judgment task in which the same traits were preceded by a qualifier "feels" or "looks". As expected, in the case of self-judgments, generic judgments predicted feels judgments better than looks judgments. This pattern did not occur for judgments of others and was reversed for judgments about others who were relatively unfamiliar.

Previous research on absolute trait judgments regarding self and others showed that, compared to self-judgments, other-judgments involve greater focus on external, observable (as opposed to internal, unobservable) aspects of traits. The present research attempted to extend those findings to comparative judgments. In two experiments, Polish undergraduates (N = 144) were asked to perform a series of comparative self-other judgments followed by a series of absolute judgments regarding either the self or another person. The absolute judgments employed the same traits as the comparative judgments but with the trait preceded by a qualifier: either "feels," referring to covert, unobservable aspects of the trait, or "looks," referring to overt, observable aspects. As expected, comparative judgments correlated higher with absolute feels judgments regarding the self and with absolute looks judgments regarding the other than with absolute looks judgments regarding the self and absolute feels judgments regarding the other. This occurred for self-other judgments involving acquaintances but not for self-other judgments involving close friends.

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