The positivity effect in older adults: The role of affective interference and inhibition

Abstract

Objectives: Research shows that aging often involves a decrease in the experience of negative affect and might even be associated with a stabilization or an increase in experience concerning positive affect. As it has been suggested that these changes could be related to the processing of emotional information, the aim of this study was to investigate interference and inhibition toward sad and happy faces in healthy elderly people compared to a younger population.

Method: We used an affective modification of the negative priming task. If interference is related to enhanced inhibition, reduced interference from negative stimuli and a related weakened inhibition toward negative stimuli in the elderly group would be in line with the positivity hypothesis.

Results: As expected, the results indicated that interference from negative stimuli was significantly lower in older adults as compared to younger adults, whereas this was not the case for positive stimuli. Moreover, at inhibitory level a significantly reduced processing of negative stimuli was observed only in the older adult group, whereas there was no such effect in the case of positive material.

Conclusion: These observations are indicative for a decreased negative bias in older adults at information processing level. This provides new insights with regard to age-related differences in emotion processing.

Keywords:

• older adults
• interference
• inhibition
• positivity effect
• emotion
• negative priming

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the Special Research Fund of Ghent University (Belgium). Special thanks to the seniors and director Kris De Smet of the Centre for Senior Citizens of the Flemish Community of Brussels-Capital for taking part in this study.

Notes

Note

1. In order to obtain a similar point of comparison with the younger adult group (e.g., with regard to processing time), the same response cut-off response score of 4000 ms was used. However, in the younger adult group, the same result pattern was found when using a cut-off score of 2000 ms.