Speaking Well and Feeling Good: Age Related Differences in the Affective Language of Resting State Thought

Abstract

Despite the prevalence and potential importance of resting state cognition for daily functioning and psychological wellbeing, no study has yet probed whether older age is associated with augmented precision in the use of emotional words during unconstrained contexts. Age-related increases in this construct – here termed “affective lexical granularity” – could be a novel manifestation of the positivity effect, with implications for wellbeing. Therefore, across two studies, we instructed a total of 77 young adults and 74 cognitively normal older adults to speak their thoughts freely during a Think-Aloud Paradigm and computed the emotional properties of words spoken as well as participants’ retrospective self-report affective experiences. Study 1, conducted before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, revealed that older adults exhibited higher positive, but not negative, lexical granularity compared to younger adults, paralleled by increases in psychological wellbeing and an increase in self-reported positive thoughts. Despite being conducted virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic, Study 2 replicated many of Study 1’s main findings, generalizing these results across independent samples and study contexts. Collectively, these results suggest that normal cognitive aging, in our mostly white non-Hispanic sample, may be associated with an increase in the use of unique positive words during natural periods of restful thought, and may therefore reveal a novel expression of the “positivity effect” witnessed in this population. These data may also have broad implications for clinical populations whose natural thought content may differ, such as individuals with depression or other mental health conditions.