Age‐related differences in attention and memory toward emotional stimuli

Abstract

From the perspectives of time perception and motivation, socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) postulates that in comparison with younger adults, older adults tend to prefer positive stimuli and avoid negative stimuli. Currently the cross-cultural consistency of this positivity effect (PE) is still not clear. While empirical evidence for Western populations is accumulating, the validation of the PE in Asians is still rare. The current study compared 28 younger and 24 older Chinese adults in the processing of emotional information. Eye-tracking and recognition data of participants in processing pictures with positive, negative, or neutral emotional information sampled from the International Affection Picture System were collected. The results showed less negative bias for emotional attention in older adults than in younger adults, whereas for emotional recognition, only younger adults showed a negative bias while older adults showed no bias between negative and positive emotional information. Overall, compared with younger adults, emotional processing was more positive in older adults. It was concluded that Chinese older adults show a PE.

The impact of aversive context on early threat detection in trauma exposed individuals and associations with post-traumatic stress symptoms

“…Fifth, there were age differences between the two samples-participants in Study 1 were somewhat older than those in Study 2. There is some evidence that AB towards unmasked, positive stimuli is impacted in healthy, older adults (e.g., age 60+; Bi and Han, 2015 ; Namaky et al, 2017 ); however, it is unclear how (a) this research applies to middle-aged adults (such as those in Study 1), (b) this might extend to a masked dot-probe paradigm, or (c) the effect of trauma impacts SST. Sixth, the majority (94%) of Study 1 participants had a comorbid Substance Use Disorder (SUD) diagnosis, where only a portion (35%) of Study 2 did.…”

Attention and Emotion-Enhanced Memory: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Behavioural and Neuroimaging Evidence

“…Two experiments (Humpreys et al, 2010; Kim et al, 2013) using paired-pictures reported greater fixations to negative than neutral images, which translated into enhanced memory for negative over neutral items at recall. One experiment (Chang & Choi, 2014) reported that gaze duration predicted memory for emotional narratives but not for emotional images, while another study (Bi & Han, 2015) found that greater fixation time toward negative than positive and neutral stimuli predicted memory performance for negative stimuli. Of the 15 experiments, one (Ziaei et al, 2015) measured pupillary responses, and reported larger pupil sizes for positive targets presented with negative distractors relative to neutral distractors, which translated into greater memory for positive items.…”