The negativity bias is eliminated in older adults: Age-related reduction in event-related brain potentials associated with evaluative categorization.

Abstract

Studies of younger adults have found that negative information has a stronger influence than positive information across a wide range of domains. T. A. Ito, J. T. Larsen, N. K. Smith, and J. T. Cacioppo (1998) reported that during evaluative categorization, extreme negative images produced greater brain activity than did equally extreme positive images in younger adults. Older adults have been reported to optimize affect and attend less to negative information. In this article, the negativity bias was examined in 20 older versus 20 younger adults during evaluative categorization, with a focus on brain activity occurring roughly 500 ms after presentation of visual stimuli. Results demonstrated a significant decrease in brain activity to both positive and negative stimuli (p < .05) and an elimination of the negativity bias in older adults.

Neural modulation of directed forgetting by valence and arousal: An event-related potential study

“…The involvement of these regions supports the notion that motivated attention may therefore lead to preferential processing of emotional information. As such, in the context of the current experiment, it is likely that participants devoted greater attention toward studying negative items relative to the other conditions, a finding that-much like our behavioural results-is consistent with a "negativity bias" in young adults' attention and brain responses to emotional words (e.g., Wood & Kisley, 2006). The fact that these items may have received more attention may also be a factor in why recognition of high arousing negative TBF items was enhanced relative to the other similarly cued conditions.…”

The influence of monetary incentives on context processing in younger and older adults: an event-related potential study

“…Although the age-related topography difference is a well-known finding (see Fabiani, Friedman, & Cheng, 1998;Friedman, Nessler, Johnson, Ritter, & Bersick, 2008), age differences in the anticipation of motivational events have only rarely been investigated and are not well understood (Olofsson et al, 2008;Samanez-Larkin et al, 2007;Wood & Kisley, 2006). Hence, our study suggests that although the voluntary allocation of attention to process and update information about gains and losses, reflected in the P3b, is compromised, the automatic processing of salient information, as reflected in the P2, is preserved in old age.…”

Affective picture processing: An integrative review of ERP findings

“…Such negativity bias may reflect rapid activity by amygdala processing of aversive information (LeDoux, 1995;Morris et al, 1998), so that attentional resources are engaged more readily for unpleasant relative to neutral or pleasant stimuli (Cacioppo and Berntson, 1994;. The negativity-bias framework has been linked to attention processing through findings of picture valence effects in ERPs (Carretie et al, 2001Wood and Kisley, 2006). According to this view, attention is automatically oriented towards events that might pose a threat to the perceiver in an evolutionarily adaptive fashion (Öhman et al, 2001).…”

“…When young and older adult subjects were compared using startle-elicited ERPs as a measure of arousal from emotional pictures, smaller N1 and P3 amplitudes were obtained for the older adults irrespective of affective stimulation (Smith et al, 2005). IAPS images produced a decrease in LPP amplitude for arousing pictures in older adults (particularly for unpleasant pictures) but no age-related difference for earlier components (Wood and Kisley, 2006). The results imply that a "negativity bias" is present in younger adults, but decreased in elderly adults.…”