Affective Influences on Older Adults’ Attention to Self-Relevant Negative Information

Abstract

Objectives: Some research suggests that older adults have a tendency to be biased toward positive information, but may be more willing to attend to potentially beneficial negative information in certain situations. Following the mood-as-resource framework, one possibility is that older adults may be more willing to consider negative information when in a positive mood, with positive affect serving as a buffer to the adverse emotional consequences that may follow. Method: Young (n = 62) and older (n = 65) adults completed a difficult cognitive task before completing either a positive or negative experience recall task, depending upon assigned condition. Afterwards, they rated their interest in viewing their strengths and weaknesses on the previously completed task, and then selected and viewed different types of feedback (i.e., strengths or weaknesses). Results: Older adults in the positive condition selected more weaknesses to view and spent more time viewing weaknesses than older adults in the negative condition. There were no differences across conditions in behavioral results for young adults. Ratings of interest in viewing different types of feedback did not correspond with actual feedback viewing behavior. Discussion: Results highlight the importance of considering older adults' pre-existing mood before addressing self-relevant information that may be negative but important.

Shared Mechanisms May Support Mnemonic Benefits from Self-Referencing and Emotion

“…Motivation has been recognized as an important factor in cognitive aging, with older adults more selective with when they will deploy cognitive resources or with effects of aging on attention and memory emerging in a context-dependent fashion [24, 81, 82]. In addition, successful encoding of emotional and self-relevant processes may rely on neural substrates distinct from the oft-studied processes that decline with aging.…”

Roles of cognitive load and self‐relevance during emotional information searching on decision‐making

“…Relative to young adults, and according to socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), older adults may purposefully attend more to positive information than negative information in order to maximize their positive mood (Mather & Carstensen, 2003), which leads to the prediction that positivity effects result from voluntary cognitive control processes (Mather & Knight, 2005). However, although focusing relatively more on positive information may promote emotional satisfaction, potential conflicts between affective and self-improvement goals could be exacerbated when they encounter negative self-relevant information (Growney & Hess, 2017;Isaacowitz, Toner, Goren, & Wilson, 2008). Whether they selectively maintain their hedonic goal when we change our goal to accuracy-oriented information gathering remains unknown (Allard & Kensinger, 2018;Cacioppo, Berntson, Bechara, Tranel, & Hawkley, 2011;Narme, Peretz, Strub, & Ergis, 2016).…”

“…Motivational factors are especially likely to have an effect on cognitive aging (Growney & Hess, 2017). Older adults' motivation to seriously consider individual decisions depends on the perceived personal relevance of the decisions (Strough, de Bruin, & Peters, 2015).…”

Remembering positive or relevant information? Cultural relevance may moderate the age-related positivity effect in memory.

“…Although the age-related positivity effect has been widely identified in Western cultures (particularly the U.S. culture), some studies did not detect the effect (for reviews, see Murphy & Isaacowitz, 2008; Reed & Carstensen, 2012; Reed et al, 2014). One line of these studies has found that the age-related positivity effect diminishes or vanishes for social compared with nonsocial information (Hess, Popham, Dennis, & Emery, 2013), for personally relevant compared with personally irrelevant information (English & Carstensen, 2015; Growney & Hess, 2017; Tomaszczyk, Fernandes, & MacLeod, 2008), and for threatening compared with less threatening situations (Mather & Knight, 2006). For example, English and Carstensen (2015) found a positivity effect in health-related decision-making tasks among older adults with good health (for whom health-related information was assumed to be less personally relevant) but not among older adults with poorer health (for whom health-related information was assumed to be more personally relevant).…”

“…Personally relevant (or self-relevant) information, as discussed below, is inherently more meaningful than personally irrelevant information. However, those studies, which claimed that personal relevance reduced the age-related positivity effect, did not directly examine if certain information (e.g., health-related information) was truly perceived by participants (e.g., older adults with pooer health) as more personally relevant (English & Carstensen, 2015; Growney & Hess, 2017; Tomaszczyk et al, 2008). Mares and colleagues (2016), who examined the mediation role of meaningfulness in the age-related positivity effect, did not directly experimentally manipulate meaningfulness and, thus, was constrained from drawing a causality conclusion.…”