Aging and Goal-Directed Emotional Attention: Distraction Reverses Emotional Biases

Healthy aging is associated with increased neural processing of positive valence but attenuated processing of emotional arousal: an fMRI study

“…While the results of this and many other studies (Knight et al, 2007;Kwon et al, 2009;Mather and Carstensen, 2005) indicate a positivity bias in older adults, this effect is not always seen (e.g., Grühn et al, 2005;Isaacowitz et al, 2006). The emergence of the positivity effect can be reversed when attentional resources become limited for example (Knight et al, 2007), perhaps indicating that emotional goals are prioritized only when there are enough attentional resources available.…”

“…The emergence of the positivity effect can be reversed when attentional resources become limited for example (Knight et al, 2007), perhaps indicating that emotional goals are prioritized only when there are enough attentional resources available. The task in the current study was a passive emotional viewing paradigm however, which allowed full processing of the emotional stimuli, with no cognitive demands placed on the participants other than the simple shallow encoding task.…”

Discriminating between changes in bias and changes in accuracy for recognition memory of emotional stimuli

“…This can be a challenge when investigating recognition memory, since the number of available stimuli is relatively small and, * words regardless of whether the mode of presentation is visual (Zeelenberg et al, 2006) or auditory (Weger, Meier, Robinson, & Inhoff, 2007). In addition, when two stimuli are visually presented and one stimulus is emotionally valenced and the other is not, eye-tracking data indicate that the initial eye fixation is more likely to land on the emotionally valenced stimulus (Knight et al, 2007). These findings suggest that relatively high-level information can guide attention (e.g., Sanborn, Malmberg, & Shiffrin, 2004), that stimuli high in emotional status are more salient than neutral stimuli, and that hence, the attentional system is biased to select them for processing.…”

Features of Social Cognition in Late Adulthood

“…В более позднем возрасте (75-90 лет) наблюдается связь показателей когнитивного статуса с об-щим показателем распознавания эмоций (r=0,242, при р<0,05). Чем выше когни-тивный статус в пожилом и старческом возрасте, тем лучше дифференциация эмоций радости и гнева, что подтвержда-ется исследованием М. Найта [19]. Не-которые исследования показывают, что изменения памяти, снижение скорости обработки информации наблюдаются в период старения.…”