The interpretative lenses of older adults are not rose-colored—just less dark: Aging and the interpretation of ambiguous scenarios.

Abstract

We are all faced with ambiguous situations daily that we must interpret to make sense of the world. In such situations, do you wear rose-colored glasses and fill in blanks with positives, or do you wear dark glasses and fill in blanks with negatives? In the current study, we presented 32 older and 32 younger adults with a series of ambiguous scenarios and had them continue the stories. Older adults continued the scenarios with less negativity than younger adults, as measured by negative and positive emotion word use and by the coded overall emotional valence of each interpretation. These results illuminate an interpretative approach by older adults that favors less negative endings and that supports broader age-related positivity. Additionally, older adults interpreted social scenarios with less emotionality than younger adults. These findings uncover a new manifestation of age-related positivity in spontaneous speech generated in response to ambiguity, indicating that older adults tend to create emotional meaning differently from the young.

Adult age differences in the interpretation of surprised facial expressions.

“…Measures were collected across the entire task. The fEMG data were processed according to the protocol used in previous physiological examinations of affect (e.g., Mikels & Shuster, 2016). …”

The cognitive control of emotional versus value-based information in younger and older adults.

“…As is often the case in studies of emotion, the negative emotion information may be stronger in nature relative to positive emotion information, and this may be particularly true when positive information is not present, as was the case in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2. Despite efforts to control for arousal, future work could extend these findings using pictures or other forms of emotional information, lists that contain both negatively and positively valenced words in addition to neutral words, and when people must interpret and recall ambiguous memories (cf., Mikels & Shuster, 2016). …”

Integrating cognitive and emotion paradigms to address the paradox of aging

“…At this point, the positivity effect has been widely documented: it has been observed in visual attention (Sasse, Gamer, Büchel, & Brassen, 2014), short-term memory (Mammarella, Di Domenico, Palumbo, & Fairfield, 2016), autobiographical memory (Kennedy, Mather, & Carstensen, 2004), and even working memory (Mikels, Larkin, Reuter-Lorenz, & Carstensen, 2005). The effect has been documented in attention to emotional faces (Fischer et al, 2005; Mather & Carstensen, 2003), memory for health information (English & Carstensen, 2015), and in the interpretation of socially ambiguous situations (Mikels & Shuster, 2016). A meta-analysis based on 100 studies concluded that the positivity effect was reliable and robust (Reed, Chan, & Mikels, 2014).…”