The positivity effect: a negativity bias in youth fades with age

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Highlights

  • Neural degradation and cognitive impairment cannot account for the positivity effect.

  • Cognitive load reduces the positivity effect.

  • Constraints on time horizons produce the positivity effect in young people.

  • Selective attention to positive information may hold both advantageous and detrimental consequences for older adults.

Relative to younger adults, older adults attend to and remember positive information more than negative information. This shift from a negativity bias in younger age to a preference for positive information in later life is termed the ‘positivity effect.’ Based on nearly two decades of research and recent evidence from neuroscience, we argue that the effect reflects age-related changes in motivation that direct behavior and cognitive processing rather than neural or cognitive decline. Understanding the positivity effect, including conditions that reduce and enhance it, can inform effective public health and educational messages directed at older people.

Introduction

In 2003 Charles et al. [1] reported findings from a study in which young, middle-aged, and older adults were asked to view images that varied by emotional valence. Some of the images were negative, some positive and others neutral. Compared to the youngest participants, middle-aged participants displayed a modest preference in memory for positive over negative images and elderly participants were far more likely to recall positive images than negative. Earlier research had demonstrated an age-related preference for emotional material over other types of information (e.g., [2]) but none had shown differential processing of positive and negative material.

The observation was striking given its juxtaposition with a large literature documenting a negativity bias in younger people. Infants reliably orient to negative stimuli more than positive, and scores of studies have shown that children detect and remember threatening stimuli better than non-threatening stimuli (e.g., [3, 4, 5]). Social psychologists have widely documented the attention-grabbing properties of negative information in young adults (mostly college students) and shown that negative events are more likely to be remembered and retold in the social transmission of stories than positive events [6]. In a now classic paper titled, ‘Bad is stronger than good,’ Baumeister and colleagues [7] argued that a negativity bias in humans is so reliable that it can be considered a fundamental principle of human behavior. It makes logical sense: attending to the lion in the brush more than the puppy in the grass likely holds evolutionary advantages [8].

Yet since Charles et al. [1] was published, scores of studies have documented an age-associated reversal in preferences for negative over positive stimuli in attention and in memory. Coined, the positivity effect, the pattern refers to a shift from a negativity bias early in life to a positivity bias that emerges in middle and late adulthood (see [9]). Studies have examined the positivity effect in attention, short-term memory [10], autobiographical memory [11, 12], and even working memory [13] using a wide range of experimental paradigms, from eye-tracking [14, 15, 16•] to neuroimaging [17••, 18]. The effect has been shown in many different contexts including attention to emotional faces [19], recall of facial expressions [20], memory for health information [21, 22••], focusing more on positive than negative old age stereotypes [23], and the interpretation of socially ambiguous situations [24].

Abundant empirical evidence for the positivity effect led to broad acceptance of the observation. Underlying mechanisms, on the other hand, continue to be debated. In this review, we describe initial findings and recent studies on the positivity effect and make the case that the body of literature is most coherent when viewed through the lens of motivated cognition.

Section snippets

Socioemotional selectivity theory

The positivity effect was first identified through tests of hypotheses grounded in socioemotional selectivity theory (SST). SST is a life-span theory of motivation that postulates systematic changes in goals as a function of perceived time horizons [25]. SST maintains that when time horizons are vast and nebulous, as they typically are in youth, goals tend to concern exploration and learning. In contrast, as time horizons grow limited, as they typically do with age, goals shift to ones realized

Exploring alternative explanations

Although the age-related preference for positive material was identified by tests of hypotheses derived from SST, explorations of alternatives have helped to refine the concept. Two of the most viable alternatives — namely, cognitive decline and neural degradation — have been largely ruled out. Dynamic integration theory [31] posits that general age-related declines in processing capacity also affect the processing of emotion. Specifically, DIT maintains that negative information is more

Failures to replicate the positivity effect

Shortly after Charles et al. [1] was published, our research group continued to replicate the phenomenon [12, 19] and evidence from other laboratories began to accrue [49, 50, 51, 52]. Yet there were also failures to replicate using very similar methods to ours [53, 54]. We began to search for systematic differences that might account for inconsistencies and recognized a subtle but theoretically important difference in approach. In our research, participants simply viewed stimuli and recall was

Is the positivity effect an explicit strategy or goal directed cognitive processing?

Some researchers have treated the positivity effect as an emotion regulation strategy [57]. As originally conceptualized, however, the positivity effect reflects goal-directed cognitive processing not a deliberative strategy. The former presumes that goals about emotional satisfaction and meaning direct attention to goal-relevant (viz., positive) stimuli. The latter presumes that positivity represents the strategic management of negative emotional states [58, 59]. Given abundant evidence that

Is the positivity effect adaptive?

As noted above, there are likely many advantages to focusing on positive more than negative information in daily life. One can imagine circumstances, however, when preferential treatment of positive information may be disadvantageous. Older people are the most targeted age group in financial scams [60]. Presented with clever but fraudulent enticements, a focus on positive over negative could increase risk. Along the same lines, failing to process negative information after receiving a serious

Conclusion

The discovery of a positivity effect in cognitive processing, along with subsequent challenges from the scientific community, set in motion a line of research that speaks to the utility of theory and the value of resolving issues related to replicability. The conditions under which the positivity effect appears and fails to appear have refined and supported the argument that it reflects motivated cognition driven by developmental changes in goals. The fluidity of the effect across experimental

Funding

This work was supported by a grant to Laura L. Carstensen from the National Institute on Aging [NIA R37-8816].

Conflicts of interest

Nothing declared.

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