China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Reading others’ minds
Published in Patrick Rabbitt, The Aging Mind, 2019
Whether or not we oldies can more easily recognise those face and body expressions that we can still mimic, we are better at recognising expressions of emotions if we ourselves are currently experiencing them. We are also better at recognising happiness and pleasure than anxiety, pain, anger and distress. We older people also remember faces with positive or neutral expressions better than faces with negative expressions. A possible reason for this “positivity effect” is that most old people report feeling quite cheerful most of the time. A less comfortable idea is that the older we get, the more strongly we tend to dislike, and so to suppress and ignore, negative information of any kind. There is some evidence for this “negativity suppression hypothesis” from a study that showed young and elderly people pairs of photos of faces that simultaneously disappeared and were immediately followed by a dot that fell on the previous position of one or the other [12]. Volunteers were asked to make the same response to the dot, as quickly as possible, in whatever position it appeared. They responded faster when it fell on a position previously occupied by a neutral rather than by a negative face. The authors suggest that this is because people of all ages, but especially the elderly, have a bias to select positive and suppress negative information.
Current research on developmental aspects of aging
Published in Peter G. Coleman, Ann O’Hanlon, Aging and Development, 2017
Peter G. Coleman, Ann O’Hanlon
Contrasting results were found as predicted in relation to perception of information related to death by De Raedt et al. (2013). As in Johnson and Whiting’s study this material was presented briefly as words on a screen. Older people showed less attentional avoidance than middle-aged participants, suggesting that they were more prepared to receive such information. The lessening of death-associated threat with age could also be considered a positivity effect according to socio-emotional selectivity theory. In this study the investigators attempted to control a little for generational effects by taking into account differences between the two groups in religiosity and belief in an afterlife, and still found the same age effects on attentional avoidance of death-related material.
Information Avoidance in Consumer Choice: Do Avoidance Tendencies and Motives Vary by Age?
Published in Experimental Aging Research, 2023
Stephanie L. Deng, Julia Nolte, Corinna E. Löckenhoff
With respect to affective responses, age differences in motivational priorities may make older adults even more sensitive to the emotional implications of information seeking than their younger counterparts. According to socioemotional selectivity theory, age-related limitations in time horizons lead older adults to pursue present-oriented, emotion-focused goals over future-oriented, information-focused goals (Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999). This focus on maintaining and preserving pleasant affect leads to a “positivity effect,” with older adults selectively attending to and remembering positive information better than negative information (Mather & Carstensen, 2003; Reed & Carstensen, 2012). Consistent with this effect, the tendency to forgo consequential but potentially upsetting information is positively associated with age (Hertwig et al., 2021), and in decision contexts, age-related decrements in information seeking disappear when older adults can choose to sample positive and avoid negative information (Löckenhoff & Carstensen, 2007). Thus, age differences in information avoidance may be fueled by an age-related tendency to maintain positive and avoid negative affect.
Age-related Differences and Individual Differences of the Positivity Effect in Korean Older Adults: Focused on Attentional Process for Emotional Faces
Published in Experimental Aging Research, 2021
The positivity effect refers to older adults’ (compared to younger adults) relative preference for positive stimuli over negative stimuli in cognitive processing, such as attention and memory (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005; Charles, Mather, & Carstensen, 2003; Mather & Carstensen, 2005). Since Kennedy, Mather, and Carstensen (2004) first clearly mentioned the positivity effect, more than a hundred papers have been published to illustrate this concept (Reed & Carstensen, 2012), and the positivity effect has been observed in tasks including attention, memory, and decision-making (Fernandes, Ross, Wiegand, & Schryer, 2008; Grühn, Scheibe, & Baltes, 2007; Isaacowitz, Toner, Goren, & Wilson, 2008; Kensinger, Allard, & Krendl, 2014; Kisley, Wood, & Burrows, 2007; Lee & Knight, 2009; Reed, Chan, & Mikels, 2014; Sasse, Gamer, Büchel, & Brassen, 2014; Spinol, Voss, & Grady, 2008; Sullivan, Mikels, & Carstensen, 2010; Wang, He, Jia, Tian, & Benson, 2015; Ziaei, Hippel, Henry, & Becker, 2015). However, most existing studies have been conducted in Western countries, especially in the United States and Europe, and have shown relatively consistent results. On the other hand, studies conducted in East Asian cultures, including South Korea, are limited and their results are inconsistent. In this context, the question of whether the positivity effect is a phenomenon universal across cultures has recently garnered attention. Examining the past studies conducted in East Asian cultures, including those in South Korea, studies that support the positivity effect (Kwon, Scheibe, Samanez-Larkin, Tsai, & Carstensen, 2009; Park & Park, 2011; Wang et al., 2015) and others that do not are present simultaneously (Fung et al., 2008; Ko, Kang, & Lee, 2009; Ko, Lee, Yoon, Kwon, & Mather, 2011; Park & Park, 2011).