A link between age, affect, and predictions?

Abstract

The prevalence of depressive symptoms decreases from late adolescence to middle age adulthood. Furthermore, despite significant losses in motor and cognitive functioning, overall emotional well-being tends to increase with age, and a bias to positive information has been observed multiple times. Several causes have been discussed for this age-related development, such as improvement in emotion regulation, less regret, and higher socioeconomic status. Here, we explore a further explanation. Our minds host mental models that generate predictions about forthcoming events to successfully interact with our physical and social environment. To keep these models faithful, the difference between the predicted and the actual event, that is, the prediction error, is computed. We argue that prediction errors are attenuated in the middle age and older mind, which, in turn, may translate to less negative affect, lower susceptibility to affective disorders, and possibly, to a bias to positive information. Our proposal is primarily linked to perceptual inferences, but may hold as well for higher-level, cognitive, and emotional forms of error processing.

Late Life Depression: A Narrative Review

“…Despite these methodological limitations, the recent literature highlights the effects and risk variables for late life depression, although it Volume 6; Issue 01 Int J GeriatrGerontol, an open access journal ISSN: 2577-0748 doesn't conclude that aging is associated with more depression necessarily than other stages of life. Despite all the negative effects reported for aging and depression and the methodological limitations mentioned for this recent literature, at least one research group has suggested that the prevalence of depression has decreased with age [71]. The authors argue that this has related to a bias toward positive information, increased emotion regulation, less regret and greater socioeconomic status.…”

Understanding Music and Aging through the lens of Bayesian Inference

“…Existing literature has provided a wealth of evidence and theoretical explanations underlying the emotional powers of music through a Bayesian inference perspective (i.e., musical expectancy, probabilistic predictions and statistical learning). However, the scope of emotions and aging via a Bayesian inference perspective seems to be more focused on the phenomenon that older adults tend to prefer positive experiences over negative ones (see Lima & Castro, 2011;Trapp et al, 2022). This is also known as the positivity effect, which is beyond the scope of inquiry for this review.…”