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Older adults, compared to younger adults, tend to prioritize positive information more and negative information less. We recently observed this "positivity effect" pattern in an emotion-induced blindness task, which measures attention allocated to task-irrelevant emotional stimuli in the way participants are distracted by them. Older adults were less distracted by negative images compared to younger adults. This could represent an age-related priority shift away from negative emotions. However, it could also be that older adults simply do not see negative images presented at a fast rate. A similar possibility is that older adults to fail to engage with negative stimuli because of their complex nature, rather than due to age-related changes in emotional preference per se. In the present study, we tested this possibility by manipulating the required degree of engagement with emotional distractors. Participants completed a modified emotion-induced blindness task, with emotional distractors that were either task irrelevant (younger: n = 48; older: n = 46) or task relevant (younger: n = 48; older: n = 45). The task relevance of distractors did not affect performance. Even though older adults could quickly perceive the negative images, they were less distracted by them compared to younger adults. Current theories of the positivity effect fail to fully account for these positivity effect patterns in attention, especially those that propose mechanisms requiring a substantial time to enact. The current results may require rethinking previous accounts of the positivity effect and highlight the benefits of probing the positivity effect in early cognitive processing stages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Physiological arousal affects attention and memory, sometimes enhancing and other times impairing what we attend to and remember. In the present study, we investigated how changes in physiological arousal-induced through short bursts of isometric handgrip exercise-affected subsequent working memory performance. A sample of 57 younger (ages 18-29) and 56 older (ages 65-85) participants performed blocks of isometric handgrip exercise in which they periodically squeezed a therapy ball, alternating with blocks of an auditory working memory task. We found that, compared with those in a control group, participants who performed isometric handgrip had faster reaction times on the working memory task. Handgrip-speeded responses were observed for both younger and older participants, across working memory loads. Analysis of multimodal physiological responses indicated that physiological arousal increased during handgrip. Our findings suggest that performing short bouts of isometric handgrip exercise can improve processing speed, and they offer testable possibilities for the mechanism underlying handgrip's effects on performance. The potential for acute isometric exercise to temporarily improve processing speed may be of particular relevance for older adults who show declines in processing speed and working memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Aging affects brain circuitry involved in both inhibition and arousal. In this study, we tested whether older adults are more or less prone to distraction from emotionally arousing events than young adults. To do so, we examined how arousing taboo distractor words affected concurrent 1-back task performance and subsequent memory for distractors. Our second goal was to examine how the arousal level of 1 item can modulate processing of preceding neutral distractors (taboo-minus-1 distractors). During the task, participants first made 1-back judgments about target pictures that were superimposed with to-be-ignored neutral or taboo distractors. Relative to young adults, older adults were more distracted by taboo than neutral words on the 1-back task and remembered more of the taboo distractors on a later incidental recognition task. Furthermore, young adults showed better suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors than neutral distractors, whereas in older adults, arousal did not facilitate suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors. This effect appeared to require attentional control as adding an unrelated attentional load during the 1-back task eliminated the beneficial effect of arousal for young adults' suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors. Finally, when top-down attentional guidance was provided by increasing the goal relevance of target pictures, both groups showed enhanced suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors versus other neutral distractors. Together, these findings imply that the effect of arousal on distractibility in aging may arise from an interaction between top-down and bottom-up processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

In previous research, older adults show greater emotional benefits from distracting themselves than from reappraising an event when strategically regulating emotion. Older adults also demonstrate an attentional preference to avoid, while younger adults show a bias toward approaching negative stimuli. This suggests a possible age-related differentiation of cognitive effort across approach and avoidance of negative stimuli during emotion regulation. In this study, we tracked cognitive effort via pupil dilation during the use of distraction (avoidance) and reappraisal (approach) strategies across age. Forty-eight younger adults (M = 20.94, SD = 1.78; 19 men) and 48 older adults (M = 68.82, SD = 5.40; 15 men) viewed a slideshow of negative images and were instructed to distract, reappraise, or passively view each image. Older adults showed greater pupil dilation during reappraisal than distraction, but younger adults displayed no difference between conditions-an effect that survived when controlling for gaze patterns. Gaze findings revealed that older adults looked less within images during active emotion regulation compared with passive viewing (no difference between distraction and reappraisal), and younger adults showed no difference across strategies. Younger adults gazed less within the most emotional image areas during distraction, but this did not significantly contribute to pupil response. Our findings support that distraction is less cognitively effortful than reinterpreting negative information in later life. These findings could be explained by older adults' motivational bias to disengage from negative information because of the age-related positivity effect, or compensation for decreased working memory resources across the life span. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).)

Animal research and human neuroimaging studies indicate that stress increases dopamine levels in brain regions involved in reward processing, and stress also appears to increase the attractiveness of addictive drugs. The current study tested the hypothesis that stress increases reward salience, leading to more effective learning about positive than negative outcomes in a probabilistic selection task. Changes to dopamine pathways with age raise the question of whether stress effects on incentive-based learning differ by age. Thus, the present study also examined whether effects of stress on reinforcement learning differed for younger (age 18-34) and older participants (age 65-85). Cold pressor stress was administered to half of the participants in each age group, and salivary cortisol levels were used to confirm biophysiological response to cold stress. After the manipulation, participants completed a probabilistic learning task involving positive and negative feedback. In both younger and older adults, stress enhanced learning about cues that predicted positive outcomes. In addition, during the initial learning phase, stress diminished sensitivity to recent feedback across age groups. These results indicate that stress affects reinforcement learning in both younger and older adults and suggests that stress exerts different effects on specific components of reinforcement learning depending on their neural underpinnings.

A prevalent stereotype is that people become less risk taking and more cautious as they get older. However, in laboratory studies, findings are mixed and often reveal no age differences. In the current series of experiments, we examined whether age differences in risk seeking are more likely to emerge when choices include a certain option (a sure gain or a sure loss). In four experiments, we found that age differences in risk preferences only emerged when participants were offered a choice between a risky and a certain gamble but not when offered two risky gambles. In particular, Experiments 1 and 2 included only gambles about potential gains. Here, compared with younger adults, older adults preferred a certain gain over a chance to win a larger gain and thus, exhibited more risk aversion in the domain of gains. But in Experiments 3 and 4, when offered the chance to take a small sure loss rather than risking a larger loss, older adults exhibited more risk seeking in the domain of losses than younger adults. Both their greater preference for sure gains and greater avoidance of sure losses suggest that older adults weigh certainty more heavily than younger adults. Experiment 4 also indicates that older adults focus more on positive emotions than younger adults do when considering their options, and that this emotional shift can at least partially account for age differences in how much people are swayed by certainty in their choices., (2013 APA, all rights reserved)

Previous studies reveal age by valence interactions in attention and memory, such that older adults focus relatively more on positive and relatively less on negative stimuli than younger adults. In the current study, eyeblink startle response was used to measure differences in emotional reactivity to images that were equally arousing to both age groups. Viewing positive and negative pictures from the International Affective Picture System had opposite effects on startle modulation for older and younger adults. Younger adults showed the typical startle blink pattern, with potentiated startle when viewing negative pictures compared to positive pictures. Older adults, on the other hand, showed the opposite pattern, with potentiated startle when viewing positive pictures compared to viewing negative and neutral pictures. Potential underlying mechanisms for this interaction are evaluated. This pattern suggests that, compared with younger adults, older adults are more likely to spontaneously suppress responses to negative stimuli and process positive stimuli more deeply.

People from Asian cultures are more influenced by context in their visual processing than people from Western cultures. In this study, we examined how these cultural differences in context processing affect how people interpret facial emotions. We found that younger Koreans were more influenced than younger Americans by emotional background pictures when rating the emotion of a central face, especially those younger Koreans with low self-rated stress. In contrast, among older adults, neither Koreans nor Americans showed significant influences of context in their face emotion ratings. These findings suggest that cultural differences in reliance on context to interpret others' emotions depend on perceptual integration processes that decline with age, leading to fewer cultural differences in perception among older adults than among younger adults. Furthermore, when asked to recall the background pictures, younger participants recalled more negative pictures than positive pictures, whereas older participants recalled similar numbers of positive and negative pictures. These age differences in the valence of memory were consistent across culture., ((c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved.)

The authors examined the influence of age on variety seeking in 3 experiments. When given choices among jellybeans or music, age differences in variety seeking emerged. Younger adults selected similar levels of variety when choosing what to consume immediately and what to consume later. In contrast, older adults consistently chose less variety when making choices to be consumed at a later time than when making choices to be consumed immediately. This pattern may be related to an increased focus on regulating future emotional experience that is associated with age., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved.)

The present study revealed that older adults recruit cognitive control processes to strengthen positive and diminish negative information in memory. In Experiment 1, older adults engaged in more elaborative processing when retrieving positive memories than they did when retrieving negative memories. In Experiment 2, older adults who did well on tasks involving cognitive control were more likely than those doing poorly to favor positive pictures in memory. In Experiment 3, older adults who were distracted during memory encoding no longer favored positive over negative pictures in their later recall, revealing that older adults use cognitive resources to implement emotional goals during encoding. In contrast, younger adults showed no signs of using cognitive control to make their memories more positive, indicating that, for them, emotion regulation goals are not chronically activated., ((c) 2006 APA)

Participants were given several 2-option choices and then asked to review how they felt about their decisions, to review the details of their decisions, or to do an unrelated task. When later asked to attribute features to the previous options, in each condition older adults (64-83 years) attributed significantly more positive and fewer negative features to their chosen options than to foregone options. Younger adults' (18-22 years) attributions were as choice-supportive as those of older adults in the affective review condition but were less so in the other conditions. The age difference was present even when older and younger adults were equated for source identification and recognition accuracy. This study suggests that as people age, their tendency to distort memory in favor of the options they chose increases. In addition, it suggests that affectively reviewing choices increases younger adults' tendency toward choice-supportive memory.

It was hypothesized that age-related deficits in episodic memory for feature combinations (e.g., B. L. Chalfonte & M. K. Johnson, 1996) signal, in part, decrements in the efficacy of reflective component processes (e.g., M. K. Johnson, 1992) that support the short-term maintenance and manipulation of information during encoding (e.g., F. 1. M. Craik. R. G. Morris. & M. L. Gick, 1990; T. A. Salthouse, 1990). Consistent with this, age-related binding deficits in a working memory task were found in 2 experiments. Evidence for an age-related test load deficit was also found: Older adults had greater difficulty than young adults when tested on 2 features rather than 1, even when binding was not required. Thus, disruption of source memory in older adults may involve deficits in both encoding processes (binding deficits) and monitoring processes (difficulty accessing multiple features, evaluating them, or both).