The age-related positivity effect in cognition: A review of key findings across different cognitive domains

Kim, Hyunji; Barber, Sarah J.

doi:10.1016/bs.plm.2022.08.004

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 154 publications

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“…This pattern of results was supported by the interaction involving all the factors considered in this study: while no significant interaction emerged among age, valence, and emotion in the Reproduction task, interesting age-related differences appeared in the Bisection and Doubling tasks as a function of the negative emotion considered. In the Bisection task, older adults overestimated positive stimuli over neutral and sad faces, in line with the positivity effect [ 44 , 59 ]. In comparison, younger adults overestimated sad compared to neutral and positive stimuli.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

“…According to this framework, from an evolutionary perspective, anger and sadness play different functions. While anger is crucial for younger people as it motivates actions and problem-solving, sadness is more salient for older adults as it favors disengagement in a time of unavoidable losses [ 44 ]. Regarding time perception, we speculated that older people’s tendency to avoid (underestimate) sadness more than anger could be due to the greater salience of this negative affect.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The effect of aging and emotions on time processing

La Malva,

Prete,

Di Crosta

et al. 2023

Aging Clin Exp Res

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Background Time perception is an automatic process that can be influenced by intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Aims This study aimed to investigate the effect of age and emotions on the ability to keep track of short suprasecond intervals. Methods Younger adults (N = 108, age range: 18–35) and older adults (N = 51, age range: 65–87) were asked to reproduce, bisect, or double the duration of facial stimuli randomly presented for 1500, 3000, and 4500 ms. The experiment included facial stimuli with positive, negative, or neutral expressions. Results The participants across age correctly reproduced intervals but overestimated and underestimated them when asked to bisect and double the intervals, respectively. Overall, when faces were presented with a positive or negative expression, an overestimation of time intervals emerged compared to faces with neutral expressions. Emotions had a greater effect on older adults, who showed a greater overestimation of positive facial expressions and an underestimation of sad, but not angry, facial expressions. Discussion The results provide evidence that time perception is influenced by age and emotions, with older adults showing a greater effect of emotions on time processing. Conclusion The study suggests an interaction among time processing, age, and emotions, highlighting an automatic relationship among these domains, often considered independent.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of aging and emotions on time processing

La Malva,

Prete,

Di Crosta

et al. 2023

Aging Clin Exp Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Because of age-related cognitive slowing (Salthouse, 1996), it was possible that older participants would not be able to fully process the image primes due to the relatively short stimulus onset asynchrony and thereby show reduced priming effects. However, if older adults can capitalize on prior experience and knowledge (Umanath and Marsh, 2014) and on their biases to attend to emotional information (Kim and Barber, 2022), this might facilitate their processing of emotional content and allow them to compensate for the slower processing. Another possibility was that, because of impoverished emotion recognition abilities (Isaacowitz et al, 2007;Ruffman et al, 2008), older adults might show less priming-or reduced congruency effects-due to errors in emotion identification of the primes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This suggests that they might be more sensitive to priming effects because of attentional direction toward emotional information. However, older adults sometimes perform worse than younger adults at emotion recognition, especially for complex verbal materials and certain facial expressions (Isaacowitz et al, 2007;Kim and Barber, 2022). This might present a complicating factor, as it suggests that older adults may be less susceptible to priming effects, if they fail to identify the emotion in the brief SOA window.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit measures of anthropomorphism: affective priming and recognition of apparent animal emotions

Dacey

Coane

2023

Front. Psychol.

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It has long been recognized that humans tend to anthropomorphize. That is, we naturally and effortlessly interpret the behaviors of nonhuman agents in the same way we interpret human behaviors. This tendency has only recently become a subject of empirical research. Most of this work uses explicit measures. Participants are asked whether they attribute some human-like trait to a nonhuman agent on some scale. These measures, however, have two limitations. First, they do not capture automatic components of anthropomorphism. Second, they generally only track one anthropomorphic result: the attribution (or non-attribution) of a particular trait. However, anthropomorphism can affect how we interpret animal behavior in other ways as well. For example, the grin of a nonhuman primate often looks to us like a smile, but it actually signals a state more like fear or anxiety. In the present work, we tested for implicit components of anthropomorphism based on an affective priming paradigm. Previous work suggests that priming with human faces displaying emotional expressions facilitated categorization of words into congruent emotion categories. In Experiments 1–3, we primed participants with images of nonhuman animals that appear to express happy or sad emotions, and asked participants to categorize words as positive or negative. Experiment 4 used human faces as control. Overall, we found consistent priming congruency effects in accuracy but not response time. These appeared to be more robust in older adults. They also appear to emerge with more processing time, and the pattern was the same with human as with primate faces. This demonstrates a role for automatic processes of emotion recognition in anthropomorphism. It also provides a potential measure for further exploration of implicit anthropomorphism.

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“…Age-related reductions in future time horizons may also explain why older adults preferentially attend to, and remember, positive over negative information—that is, display “positivity effects” (Barber et al, 2016; for reviews, see Barber & Kim, 2021; Reed & Carstensen, 2012). These positivity effects have now been documented in a wide variety of cognitive domains (for reviews, see Kim & Barber, 2022; Reed & Carstensen, 2012), including in autobiographical memory. Older adults classify more of their autobiographical memories as positive than do younger adults (Barber et al, 2020; Tomaszczyk & Fernandes, 2012) and with increasing age people are more likely to underestimate the intensity of negative emotions, they experienced in the past (e.g., Junghaenel et al, 2021; Kennedy et al, 2004; Ready et al, 2007).…”

Section: Affective Forecasting Accuracymentioning

confidence: 99%

Age differences in affective forecasting accuracy.

Barber

Kausar

Udry

2023

Psychology and Aging

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Affective forecasts are people's predictions of their future feelings in response to future events. In this study, we examined whether younger and older adults differ in their affective forecasting accuracy. To do so, we recruited younger and older American voters and asked them to predict how they would feel following the 2020 U.S. presidential election. In the general feelings condition, participants predicted how they would feel, in general, following an election victory or loss. In the event-related feelings condition, participants predicted their future feelings specifically about an election victory and about an election loss. Later, these same participants reported their experienced feelings (either in general or about the election outcome). In the general feelings condition, age differences in affective forecasting accuracy varied as a function of whether participants' preferred candidate won or lost the election. Among election victors, there were age-related improvements in affective forecasting accuracy of negative feelings. In contrast, among election losers there were age-related declines in affective forecasting accuracy of both negative and positive feelings. A different pattern emerged for participants in the event-related feelings condition. These participants were highly accurate in their affective forecasts, and there were minimal age differences in forecasting accuracy. Together, these results show that age differences in affective forecasting accuracy depend upon both the type of future event, and the type of future feeling being predicted. When considered together, these results also suggest that the focusing illusion plays a key role in modulating age differences in affective forecasting accuracy. Public Significance StatementWe examined whether younger and older adults differ in their ability to accurately predict their future feelings. We found that both younger and older people were extremely accurate when predicting their future feelings about a specific event and there were minimal age differences. However, there were relatively large age differences in how accurately people could predict their future feelings "in general." When people imagined how they would generally feel after a future positive event (i.e., an election win), there were age-related improvements in the accuracy of their predictions, but when people imagined how they would generally feel after a future negative event (i.e., an election loss), there were age-related declines in the accuracy of their predictions.

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The age-related positivity effect in cognition: A review of key findings across different cognitive domains

Cited by 5 publications

References 154 publications

The effect of aging and emotions on time processing

The effect of aging and emotions on time processing

Implicit measures of anthropomorphism: affective priming and recognition of apparent animal emotions

Age differences in affective forecasting accuracy.

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