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The positivity effect in older adults: the role of affective interference and inhibition
- Authors:
- GOELEVEN Ellen, DE RAEDT Rudi, DIERCKX Eva
- Journal article citation:
- Aging and Mental Health, 14(2), March 2010, pp.129-137.
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis
Research shows that aging often involves a decrease in the experience of negative affect and might even be associated with a stabilisation 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. The study used an affective modification of the negative priming task, and hypothesised that the results would show reduced interference from negative stimuli and a related weakened inhibition toward negative stimuli in the elderly group. The participants were 27 adults between the ages of 67 and 82 years. 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 the 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. The article concludes that these observations are indicative for a decreased negative bias in older adults at the information processing level. This provides new insights with regard to age-related differences in emotion processing.