Effects of age on the interactions of attentional and emotional processes: a prefrontal fNIRS study

ABSTRACT

The aging of attentional and emotional functions has been extensively studied but relatively independently. Therefore, the relationships between aging and the interactions of attentional and emotional processes remain elusive. This study aimed to determine how age affected the interactions between attentional and emotional processes during adulthood. One-hundred forty adults aged 18–79 performed the emotional variant of the Attention Network Test, which probed alerting, orienting, and executive control in the presence and absence of threatening faces. During this task, contexts with varying levels of task preparatory processes were created to modulate the effect of threatening faces on attention, and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to examine the neural underpinnings of the behavioural effects. The behavioural results showed that aging was associated with a significant decline in alerting efficiency, and there was a statistical trend for age-related deficits in executive control. Despite these age differences, age did not significantly moderate the interactions among attentional networks or between attention and emotion. Additionally, the fNIRS results showed that decreased frontal cortex functioning might underlie the age-related decline in executive control. Therefore, while aging has varying effects on different attentional networks, the interactions of attentional and emotional processes remain relatively unaffected by age.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention
• emotion
• aging
• frontal cortex
• near-infrared spectroscopy

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank Vivian Chu and Karie Chung for data collection and coding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data and code used in the analysis are available from the author upon reasonable request.

Author contributions

The author contributed to all aspects of the study, including the conception and design of the study, the analysis and presentation of data, and the writing of the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Start-up Fund for RAPs under the Strategic Hiring Scheme (P0034754) awarded by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.