Avoiding Threat in Late Adulthood: Testing Two Life Span Theories of Emotion

Abstract

The purpose of the present research was to explore the time course of age-related attentional biases and the role of emotion regulation as a potential mediator of older adults' performance in an emotion dot probe task. In two studies, younger and older adults (N = 80) completed a visual probe detection task, which presented happy, angry, and sad facial expressions. Across both studies, age influenced attentional responses to angry faces. Results indicated a bias away from angry-related facial emotion information occurring relatively late in attention. Age effects were not attributable to decreasing information processing speed or visuoperceptual function. Current results demonstrated that an age-related attentional preference away from angry facial cues was mediated by efforts to suppress emotion. Findings are discussed in relation to current theories of sociocognitive aging.

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the College of Life Sciences and Medicine of University of Aberdeen. The author would like to thank those who kindly volunteered to participate in the study. The author greatly acknowledges the contribution of two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments in an earlier version of the manuscript.

Notes

Note. NART = National Adult Reading Test (Nelson, 1982); DSST = Digit Symbol Substitution Test (Wechsler, 1981); BFRT = Benton Facial Recognition Test (Benton et al., 1983).

Note. For trial type: Same = probe in same location as emotional face; Different = probe in different position to emotional face. Standard deviations are shown in parentheses.

¹Note that since the original proposal of testing for mediation by Baron and Kenny (1986), more recent work by Sobel (1990) and MacKinnon (1994) have emphasized the importance of using a statistical test for the mediation path. The Sobel test was used in order to test the hypothesis that the mediation pathway is not equal to zero (for details see Dudley, Benuzillo, & Carrico, 2004).

Note. PR-Test = Pelli-Robson Contrast Sensitivity Test (Pelli et al., 1988); NART = National Adult Reading Test (Nelson, 1982); DSST = Digit Symbol Substitution Test (Wechsler, 1981); PANAS = Positive and Negative Affectivity Schedule (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988); HADS = The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (Zigmond & Snaith, 1983); ERQ, Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Gross & John, 2003).

Note. For trial type: Same = probe in same location as emotional face; Different = probe in different position to emotional face. Standard deviations are shown in parentheses.