AGING AND ATTENTION TO SELF-SELECTED EMOTIONAL CONTENT: A MOBILE EYE TRACKING INVESTIGATION

Previous studies have found that older adults attend relatively more to positive and less to negative stimuli when presented with a single stream of affective input. In everyday life, however, attentional deployment is fundamentally and dynamically related to an earlier stage of emotion regulation: situation selection. We present 2 studies using mobile eye tracking to test for age differences in selections of emotional stimuli, and attention to selected choices. Younger, middle-aged, and older individuals were induced into either a negative (Study 1) or positive (Study 2) mood. Half were instructed to specifically try to regulate their mood state before having their selections, attention, and mood recorded. A database-oriented solution was implemented to analyze fixations to positive, negative, and neutral videos once selected. Findings suggested more similarities than differences among age groups in what material was selected, how participants attended to selected material, and how their choices and attention predicted mood.