Aging Impairs Disengagement From Negative Words in a Dot Probe Task

Abstract

Age differences in emotional processes have been of great interest. Previous studies using the dot probe task show that older adults can be more influenced by negative emotionally valenced faces than younger adults. Subsequent work has demonstrated two distinctive ways people engage with stimuli in this task, namely orienting to and disengaging from emotional stimuli. In the present study, we examined the effects of aging as well as ability to orient to and disengage from emotional words in a dot probe task. Older and younger adults viewed word pairs (positive-neutral, negative-neutral, and neutral-neutral) on a computer screen and pressed a button to identify a probe that replaced one of the words in the pair, responding as quickly as possible. Probes replaced either the emotional or neutral word. This design tests whether effects of aging were larger for disengaging (identifying a probe that replaced a neutral word in an emotional-neutral trial), compared to orienting (identifying a probe that replaced an emotional word in an emotional-neutral trial), and whether the pattern was exaggerated for negative compared to positive stimuli. Attentional bias estimates were calculated with mean reaction times for each trial-type. Older adults showed a specific impairment in disengaging from negative words. These results could reflect challenges with cognitive control and inhibition with age, which in this study are larger for older adults in the presence of negative information.

Aging and inhibition: Introduction to the special issue.

“…The deletion function is responsible for clearing the mental workspace to focus only on current concerns by suppressing mental representations that were never relevant in the first instance as well as those that became irrelevant as goals, tasks, and topics changed (e.g., Lustig, May, & Hasher, 2001; Radvansky & Copeland, 2006). Deletion (which has also been referred to as “disengagement” and working memory “updating”; Miyake et al, 2000; Talbot, Ksander, & Gutchess, 2018) also plays a role in successive tasks such as in multiple list recall, in reading comprehension, and in prospective and retrospective memory tasks (Campbell, Trelle, & Hasher, 2014; Hamm & Hasher, 1992; Scullin, Bugg, McDaniel, & Einstein, 2011). Finally, the restraint function allows for selection among competing responses by suppressing prepotent (or relatively automatic) responses in both thought and action (e.g., Spieler, Balota, & Faust, 1996; Williams, Ponesse, Schachar, Logan, & Tannock, 1999).…”

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

“…Though the positivity effect has been documented using the dot-probe task in humans (Lee & Knight, 2009;Orgeta, 2011;Talbot et al, 2018;Tomaszczyk & Fernandes, 2014), the effect only emerges under certain experimental configurations making it altogether not particularly surprising that we did not find effects in this sample. For example, Orgeta (2011) found no evidence of the effect when stimuli were presented for 17 ms or 500 ms but did when stimuli were presented for 1000 ms.…”

“…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.

“…Though the positivity effect has been documented using the dot-probe task in humans (L. O. Lee & Knight, 2009; Mather & Carstensen, 2003; Orgeta, 2011; Talbot et al, 2018; Tomaszczyk & Fernandes, 2014), the effect only emerges under certain experimental configurations making it altogether not particularly surprising that we did not find effects in this sample. For example, Orgeta (2011) found no evidence of the effect when stimuli were presented for 17 or 500 ms but did when stimuli were presented for 1,000 ms.…”