Is There a Paradox of Aging: When the Negative Aging Stereotype Meets the Positivity Effect in Older Adults

Abstract

The positivity effect worked by choosing positive stimuli rather than avoiding negative stimuli. The role of emotion regulation in older adults was limited, and when the positivity effect faced the effect of the negative aging stereotype, the negative stereotype effect was dominant. Future research should explore the changes in the positivity effect in the face of a positive aging stereotype and what roles other factors (e.g., activation level of the stereotype, arousal level of affective words) might play.

How socioeconomic status, social capital and functional independence are associated with subjective wellbeing among older Indian adults? A structural equation modeling analysis

“…Considering the relationship between socio-demographic factors and LSWB, findings from the current study revealed that persons in the oldest old age group (80 +) had a higher level of SWB than their younger counterparts. This is compatible with a phenomenon known as the paradox of ageing that shows the reduced emotional reactions to the negative situations influenced by shifts in the preferred strategies and goal priorities by advancing age [64,65]. Therefore, older adults in higher age groups are able to maintain positive psychological well-being which leads to greater levels of SWB among them.…”

The positivity effect: a negativity bias in youth fades with age

“…Studies have examined the positivity effect in attention, short-term memory [10], autobiographical memory [11,12], and even working memory [13] using a wide range of experimental paradigms, from eye-tracking [14,15,16•] to neuroimaging [17••, 18]. The effect has been shown in many different contexts including attention to emotional faces [19], recall of facial expressions [20], memory for health information [21,22••], focusing more on positive than negative old age stereotypes [23], and the interpretation of socially ambiguous situations [24•]. …”

Is Reliance on the Affect Heuristic Associated With Age?

“…Age-related changes in affect-reliance are well-documented in the contexts of memory (Fung & Carstensen, 2003;Mikels, Larkin, Reuter-Lorenz, & Carstensen, 2005;Zhang, Fung, & Ching, 2009), information seeking (English & Carstensen, 2015;Löckenhoff & Carstensen, 2007, 2008, judgment (Shamaskin, Mikels, & Reed, 2010;Zhou, Lu, Chen, Dong, & Yao, 2017) and decision making (Chen & Ma, 2009;Chou, Lee, & Ho, 2007;Huang et al, 2015;Mikels et al, 2010;Notthoff & Carstensen, 2014;Zhang et al, 2009). In general, this research has found that older adults attend more strongly to affective information and the valence associated with affective information (i.e., positive, neutral, or negative affect) than younger adults do.…”

“…Specifically, older adults are more likely to focus on or select positively valenced faces, descriptive terms, facts, or persuasive messages than younger adults do, and less likely to attend to, select, or be persuaded by negatively valenced information (Löckenhoff & Carstensen, 2007, 2008Mather & Carstensen, 2003;Notthoff & Carstensen, 2014;Zhou et al, 2017). Unlike younger adults, older adults also remember affective information better than visual information, positive stimuli better than negative stimuli, and information stressing affective goals better than information stressing future-oriented or neutral goals (Mather & Carstensen, 2003;Mikels et al, 2005;Shamaskin et al, 2010;Zhang et al, 2009).…”