Evaluative ratings and attention across the life span: emotional arousal and gender

ABSTRACT

This study was designed to investigate the evolution of emotional processing over the whole adult life span as a function of stimulus arousal and participants’ gender. To this end, self-reported affective evaluation and attentional capture prompted by pleasant and unpleasant pictures varying in arousal were measured in a large sample of participants (n = 211) balanced by gender and equally spread across seven decades from 20 to 90 years. Results showed age differences only for affective evaluation of pleasant stimuli, with opposite patterns depending on stimulus arousal. As age increased, low-arousing pleasant cues (e.g. images of babies) were experienced as more pleasant and arousing by both males and females, whereas high-arousing stimuli (e.g. erotic images) were experienced as less pleasant only by females. In contrast, emotional pictures (both pleasant and unpleasant) were effective at capturing attention in a similar way across participants, regardless of age and gender. Taken together, these findings suggest that specific emotional cues prompt different subjective responses across different age groups, while basic mechanisms involved in attentional engagement towards both pleasant and unpleasant stimuli are preserved in healthy ageing.

KEYWORDS:

• Ageing
• gender
• evaluative ratings
• natural scenes
• emotion

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Dr Eric Vanman, and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the earlier version of this article and to Giulia Sbaffi, Margherita Tosto, Alessandra Fantozzi and Romina Muratori for their kind help in data collection. The authors are also grateful to all participants who took part in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Vera Ferrari http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1070-6691

Nicola Bruno http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4948-9746

Rabih Chattat http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3889-2839

Maurizio Codispoti http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7285-4342

Notes

1. In order to decrease chances of Type II error (false negative), we increased the sample size by collapsing more age decades, ending up with only two age groups – middle (30–59) and old (60–90), with an average of about 45 participants per cell. Participants in the very young age decade (20–29 years) were left out because of the even number of decades. The key findings were nearly the same as when we performed the statistical analysis with less observations per cell (see results by age decade).

Only for the ratings of unpleasant pictures, a slight but significant effect emerged with the two-group vs. the seven-group analysis: all unpleasant pictures (both low and high arousing) were rated as more unpleasant and more arousing in the old group (60–90), compared to the middle-age group (30–59), Fs(1,167) > 5, ps < .05,  > .03. Again, RTs in the emotional interference task did not show any significant age group x picture content interaction.