Positive information facilitates response inhibition in older adults only when emotion is task-relevant

Abstract

Emotional information is integral to everyday life and impacts a variety of cognitive abilities including response inhibition, a critical skill for maintaining appropriate and flexible behaviour. However, reported effects of emotion on response inhibition are inconsistent in younger adults, and very limited in older adults. Effects of aging are especially relevant because emotion regulation improves with aging despite declining inhibitory control over neutral information. Across three studies, we assessed the impact of emotional facial expressions on response inhibition in younger and older adults while manipulating attention to task stimuli. Emotional faces (versus neutral faces) altered response inhibition only when task instructions required explicit attention to emotional attributes of the faces. When directly comparing fear faces to happy faces, both age groups had better response inhibition to happy faces. Age further influenced differences across conditions, in that happy faces enhanced response inhibition relative to neutral faces in older adults but not younger adults. Thus, emotional response inhibition for task-relevant (but not task-irrelevant) positive information is enhanced in late life compared to early adulthood. The present work extends the nascent literature on emotional response inhibition in aging, and proffers a framework to reconcile the mixed literature on this topic in younger adults.

Inhibitory control and its relationship to positivity biases in older adults

“…This model draws on the argument that positive information is less cognitively demanding than negative information (Labouvie-Vief, 2003) thereby leading to an age-related positivity bias. However, our results, and similar findings in the field (Sakaki et al, 2019;Williams et al, 2020), argue against the aging brain model by suggesting that older adults who have preserved levels of inhibitory control demonstrate a larger positivity bias in memory. Taken together, these findings oppose the claim that positive information is preferred by older adults due to it being less cognitively demanding.…”

“…Future studies should not only continue to test this facet of executive functioning in order to establish a rigorous body of research regarding its role in positivity biases, but should also include the remaining two facets of cognitive control (updating and shifting) into their paradigm. Furthermore, it must also be noted that, while there is emerging evidence highlighting the role of inhibitory control in determining positivity biases (see Sakaki et al, 2019;Williams et al, 2020), this study is the first of its kind to utilise the anti-saccade task in order to investigate this link.…”

“…Inhibition is used to select more appropriate behaviours that are consistent with one's goals in order to implement more adaptive goal-oriented behaviours (Miyake et al, 2000) and enable goals to regulate thought and action by suppressing otherwise automatic activation of goal-irrelevant information. Due to the fact that the positivity effect is believed to be the result of a shift of motivation in order to regulate emotions and ignore goal-irrelevant negative information, the relationship between inhibitory control and the positivity effect seems like the most appropriate candidate mechanism to investigate (see also Sakaki et al, 2019;Williams et al, 2020). Specifically, the current study hypothesised that older adults would show a bias towards remembering stimuli with a positive valence, in keeping with the previous literature, and additionally that older adults who had a higher (lower) level of inhibitory control would show a larger (smaller) positivity effect thereby drawing a connection between inhibitory control and the positivity effect.…”

Happy facial expressions impair inhibitory control with respect to fearful facial expressions but only when task-relevant.

“…Thus, in such a design, the motor response is conflated with stimulus valence. Third, Williams et al (2020), unlike us, did not use a within-subjects design.…”

“…Two other studies tried to assess the impact of task-relevance of facial emotional expressions on inhibition to the best of our knowledge. Williams et al (2020) tested such relationship by administering three SST versions. In one version, participants were instructed to stop their movements whenever a face was shown regardless of its emotional expression (fear, happy, or neutral).…”