Affect across adulthood: Evidence from English, Dutch, and Spanish.

Abstract

Emotions play a fundamental role in language learning, use, and processing. Words denoting positivity account for a larger part of the lexicon than words denoting negativity, and they also tend to be used more frequently, a phenomenon known as positivity bias. However, language experience changes over an individual's lifetime, making the examination of the emotion-laden lexicon an important topic not only across the life span but also across languages. Furthermore, existing theories predict a range of different age-related trajectories in processing valenced words. The present study pits all of these predictions against written productions (Facebook status updates from over 20,000 users) and behavioral data from three publicly available megastudies on different languages, namely English, Dutch, and Spanish, across adulthood. The production data demonstrated an increase in positive word types and tokens with advancing age. In terms of comprehension, the results showed a uniform and consistent effect of valence across languages and cohorts based on data from a visual word recognition task. The difference in reaction times to very positive and very negative words declined with age, with responses to positive words slowing down more strongly with age than responses to negative words. We argue that the results stem from lifelong learning and emotion regulation: Advancing age is accompanied by an increased type frequency of positive words in language production, which is mirrored as a discrimination penalty in comprehension. To our knowledge, this is the first study to simultaneously target both language production and comprehension across adulthood and in a cross-linguistic perspective.

Age-related evaluations of imageability and subjective frequency for 1286 neutral and emotional French words: ratings by young, middle-aged, and older adults

“…The authors concluded that emotional preferences are flexible and plastic and are not necessarily related to chronological age. Changes in emotional preferences across age seem to be particularly robust, as suggested by a recent study that found evidence for such a pattern in different languages (i.e., English, Dutch and Spanish), in both language comprehension and production (Kyröläinen et al, 2021).…”

“…Several studies have reported that word emotionality influences word recognition (e.g., Kousta et al, 2009;Kuperman et al, 2014) and recall (e.g., Adelman & Estes, 2013). Moreover, the effect of emotional valence has been found to vary across age (e.g., Kensinger, 2008;Kyröläinen et al, 2021, Lynchard & Radvansky, 2012. In a free recall task, Kensinger (2008) found that for low-arousing words, distinct emotional preferences were observed among young and older adults.…”

“…As already noted, this may be due to the overall increase in imageability ratings for older adults as compared with younger ones, such that the relationships between imageability and other lexical and/or emotional variables should systematically be weakened during aging. It can also be argued that word imageability plays a role in the age-related change in the processing of emotional words, as suggested by several studies conducted in the field of emotion and aging (Charles, Mather & Carstensen, 2003;Isaacowitz et al, 2006aIsaacowitz et al, , 2006bKennedy et al, 2004;Kyröläinen et al, 2021;Mikels et al, 2005). In particular, the emotional regulation that is assumed to occur with age (Carstensen et al, 1999) could modify the mental images created for emotional words by older adults as compared with younger adults.…”

See no evil: Attentional bias towards threat is diminished in aged monkeys

“…1 For example, compared to younger adults, older adults tend to recall proportionately more positive relative to negative information (Charles et al, 2003;Gerhardsson et al, 2019;Joubert et al, 2018; Q. Kennedy et al, 2004;Mammarella et al, 2016), use more positive language (Kyröläinen et al, 2021), and attend more to positively and less to negatively valenced visual stimuli (Isaacowitz et al, 2006a(Isaacowitz et al, , 2006bLee & Knight, 2009;, 2005Nikitin & Freund, 2011;Orgeta, 2011;Talbot et 1 Importantly, the age-related positivity effect does not refer to any age-related biases in affective experience. While there is some evidence of improvement in affective experiences with age (Carstensen et al, 2011;Mroczek, 2001;Sheibe et al, 2013), the positivity effect is solely concerned with information processing (e.g., memory and attention) biases related to valenced stimuli.…”

See no evil: Attentional bias toward threat is diminished in aged monkeys.

“…For example, compared to younger adults, older adults tend to recall proportionately more positive relative to negative information (Charles et al, 2003; Gerhardsson et al, 2019; Joubert et al, 2018; Q. Kennedy et al, 2004; Mammarella et al, 2016), use more positive language (Kyröläinen et al, 2021), and attend more to positively and less to negatively valenced visual stimuli (Isaacowitz et al, 2006a, 2006b; L. O. Lee & Knight, 2009; Mather & Carstensen, 2003, 2005; Nikitin & Freund, 2011; Orgeta, 2011; Talbot et al, 2018; Tomaszczyk & Fernandes, 2014; Wang et al, 2020).…”