Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory

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As people get older, they experience fewer negative emotions. Strategic processes in older adults' emotional attention and memory might play a role in this variation with age. Older adults show more emotionally gratifying memory distortion for past choices and autobiographical information than younger adults do. In addition, when shown stimuli that vary in affective valence, positive items account for a larger proportion of older adults' subsequent memories than those of younger adults. This positivity effect in older adults' memories seems to be due to their greater focus on emotion regulation and to be implemented by cognitive control mechanisms that enhance positive and diminish negative information. These findings suggest that both cognitive abilities and motivation contribute to older adults' improved emotion regulation.

Introduction

There are reasons to believe that well-being should decline as people get older. Physical health and cognitive abilities decline and the amount of lifetime remaining decreases. Yet the frequency of negative affect (emotions) decreases throughout most of adulthood and levels off around age 60 1, 2, 3. Positive affect remains largely stable across adult lifetime, although some studies show modest increases [3] or slight decreases [2] with age. Thus, the ratio of positive to negative affect improves through adulthood. What might explain this surprising observation across the same years that physical and cognitive health declines? In this article, we review recent findings that suggest that a greater focus on emotional goals among older adults lead them to favor positive and avoid negative information in their attention and memory. Interactions between emotion and cognition, although important to understand at all ages, might be particularly relevant for understanding and improving cognitive performance in older adults.

Section snippets

Cognitive control declines with age

Perhaps the most widely acknowledged psychological change with age is the decline in cognitive processes, especially memory. However, not all cognitive processes decline with age – not even all types of memory. One general characterization is that older adults have impaired cognitive control that is associated with deterioration in prefrontal brain regions 4, 5. Thus, older adults show deficits on attention and memory tasks that require the generation and maintenance of internal strategies

Emotion regulation improves with age

In contrast with the declines seen in cognitive control, age does not impair emotional control. Compared with younger adults, older adults report that they focus more on selfcontrol of their emotions and rate their emotion-regulation skills as better 10, 11. When dealing with an upsetting interpersonal situation, older adults report being less likely to engage in destructive behavioral responses such as shouting or name calling [12]. A study that sampled participants' moods at random intervals

Older adults' attention shows signs of emotion regulation

We fully attend to only a small portion of what is happening around us and often fail to process information that is not consistent with current goals [18]. Older adults' greater focus on regulating emotion is therefore likely to change what they pay attention to. A study supporting this possibility used a dot-probe task, in which one emotional and one neutral face appeared side by side on a computer screen for 1 s [19]. When the faces disappeared, a dot appeared behind one of the faces. Older

Older adults' memory also shows influence of emotion regulation

Like attention, memory is selective. As attended information is more likely to be remembered than nonattended information, initial attention provides one filter of the incoming information stream [26]. Older adults' attentional biases reviewed in the previous section should therefore influence what gets encoded. Goals also influence how memories are reconstructed later 27, 28, 29, 30, so emotional goals would be expected to lead older adults to distort their memories in a positive direction

Effective emotion regulation requires cognitive control

As reviewed in the section on attention, older adults are more likely than younger adults to ignore negative information 19, 20, 24. Goal-directed selective attention requires control processes, as do other types of emotion regulation strategies, such as situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, reappraisal, and response modulation [47]. Research with younger adults suggests that the anterior cingulate, medial prefrontal cortex and orbital/ventromedial frontal cortex

The amygdala and aging

The amygdala is a region of the brain that responds to emotionally arousing information (especially negative, threatening information) and helps enhance the consolidation of memory for such information 57, 58, 59, 60. Thus, it is possible that age-related declines in the amygdala might account for some of the age differences in emotional attention and memory.

However, current evidence suggests that older adults' preferential ignoring and forgetting of negative stimuli is not the result of

Conclusion

Because of their power to affect mood, memories have a utility that goes beyond the information they convey (see, for example, [66]). Recent research suggests that older adults are motivated by their focus on emotional goals to encode information and subsequently remember it in ways that enhance their well-being. Furthermore, those older adults who are best able to engage cognitive control mechanisms are most likely to be successful at remembering information in emotionally gratifying ways. The

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