Age-related differences in attentional bias for emotional faces

ABSTRACT

Past research suggests an aging-related positivity effect in orienting to faces. However, these studies have eschewed direct comparison of orienting when positive and negative faces are presented simultaneously, thereby potentially underestimating the degree to which emotional valence influences such effects. In the current study younger and older adults viewed face pairs for 1000 ms, and upon face-pair offset indicated the location of a dot that appeared in the former location of one of the faces, to assess attentional orienting. When shown negative–neutral pairs, both age groups were biased to attend to negative faces, but when shown positive–negative pairs only younger adults showed a bias toward negative; older adults showed a lack of orienting toward either emotional face. Results suggest younger adults have a negativity bias in attention orienting regardless of the valence of nearby stimuli, whereas older adults show an absence of this bias when positive information is present.

Keywords:

• Selective attention
• Emotion
• Aging
• Positivity effect
• Faces
• Dot probe

We thank Mark Laframboise for help with experiment programming, Veronica Lamarche for help with stimulus creation and data collection, Erica Elderhorst, Holly Shoemaker, and George Chestak for help with data collection, Vivian Cheng for help with data entry, and Dr Robin Green for input on data analysis.

This work was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) discovery grant to M.A.F and an NSERC post-graduate scholarship to J.C.T.