Can emotional acceptance buffer the link between executive functioning and mental health in late life?

Emotional acceptance is thought to play an important role in protecting mental health. However, few studies have examined emotional acceptance among older adults who may experience declines in functioning, including executive functioning. The present laboratory-based study examined whether emotional acceptance and (to determine specificity) detachment and positive reappraisal moderated links between executive functioning and mental health symptoms in a sample of healthy older adults. Emotion regulation strategies were measured using questionnaire-based measures (using established questionnaires) as well as performance-based measures (instructing individuals to use emotional acceptance, detachment, and positive reappraisal in response to sad film clips). Executive functioning was measured using a battery of working memory, inhibition, and verbal fluency tasks. Mental health symptoms were measured using questionnaires to assess anxiety and depressive symptoms. Results showed that (a) emotional acceptance moderated the link between executive functioning and mental health such that lower executive functioning predicted higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms at low but not at high levels of emotional acceptance. Moderation effects tended to be (b) stronger for emotional acceptance compared to the other emotion regulation strategies (though not all comparisons were statistically significant). Findings were (c) robust when controlling for age, gender, and education for questionnaire-based (but not performance-based) emotional acceptance. These findings contribute to the literature on emotion regulation specificity and highlight the mental health benefits of emotional acceptance in the face of low executive functioning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Falling hard, but recovering resoundingly: Age differences in stressor reactivity and recovery

Strength and vulnerability integration (SAVI) theory (Charles, 2010) posits that age differences in emotional experiences vary based on the distance from an emotionally eliciting event. Before and after a stressor, SAVI predicts that older age is related to motivational strivings that often result in higher levels of well-being. However, during stressor exposure, age differences are predicted to be attenuated or disappear completely. The present study examined how younger (n = 85; Mage = 22.56 years) and older (n = 85; Mage = 71.05 years) adults reacted to and recovered from a cognitive stressor using repeated positive and negative emotion probes. Results showed that both age groups were negatively impacted by the stressor, and both reported an initial boost in recovery afterward. However, older adults continued to improve across the recovery period compared with younger adults. This work elucidates that older adults are significantly impacted by stress but exhibit a resounding recovery. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotion, Aging, and Decision Making: A State of the Art Mini-Review

Over the past few decades, interest has begun to surge in understanding the role of emotion in decision making, and more recently in studies across the adult life span. Relevant to age-related changes in decision making, theoretical perspectives in judgment and decision making draw critical distinctions between deliberative versus intuitive/affective processes, as well as integral versus incidental affect. Empirical findings demonstrate the central role of affect in various decision-related domains such as framing and risk taking. To situate this review within an adult life-span context, we focus on theoretical perspectives in adult development regarding emotion and motivation. As a result of age differences in deliberative and emotional processes, taking a life-span perspective is critical to advance a comprehensive and grounded understanding of the role of affect in decision making. Age-related shifts in information processing from negative toward positive material also have consequential implications. By taking a life-span perspective, not only will decision theorists and researchers benefit, but so too will practitioners who encounter individuals of various ages as they make consequential decisions.

Positivity helps the medicine go down: Leveraging framing and affective contexts to enhance the likelihood to take medications

Affect can influence judgments and decision-making in multiple ways. One way is through (a) integral affect, or affect related to the choice at hand, and another way is through (b) incidental affect, or affect unrelated to the choice at hand. Research suggests integral affect influences risk-related decision-making, especially in the context of risky choice framing. However, the role of affect in other forms of framing (e.g., attribute framing) has received little attention. We examined how integral affect (Study 1) along with incidental affect (Study 2) can alter perceptions of risk and likelihood to take hypothetical medications. Participants read pamphlets about medications with unique side effects presented as a gain (e.g., 86% of people who took this medication did not experience nausea) or loss (e.g., 14% of people who took this medication did experience nausea). Study 2 extended Study 1 by manipulating incidental affect through positive, neutral, and negative affective contexts to examine its impact on subsequent evaluations of framed information. Studies 1 and 2 measured positive and negative feelings about medications, risk perceptions, and likelihood of taking medications. Across both studies, gain-framed attributes led to more positive integral affect, subsequently increasing likelihood to take medications, whereas loss-framed attributes led to more negative feelings and increased perceived riskiness of medications. Study 2 found that positive affective contexts indirectly led to an increased likelihood to take medication by increasing positive feelings about the medications. Taken together, leveraging positivity through gain frames and positive contexts could improve adherence to medication plans. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Getting to the Heart of the Matter in Later Life: The Central Role of Affect in Health Message Framing

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Adopting healthy behaviors is often influenced by message framing; gain-framed messages emphasize the benefits of engaging in a behavior, whereas loss-framed messages highlight the consequences of not engaging in a behavior. Research has begun to uncover the underlying affective pathways involved in message framing. In the current study, we examined the role of affect in message framing to encourage exercise program enrollment among older adults.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS

We mailed flyers to 126 volunteers assigned to a gain- or loss-framed condition and measured their affective reactions to the flyer and enrollment intentions. After the call, participants had the opportunity to contact us to enroll.

RESULTS

Gain versus loss framing led to more positive affect toward the flyer, which predicted intentions and enrollment effort. In indirect effect analyses, frame indirectly influenced intentions and enrollment effort via positive affect.

DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS

Although message framing plays an indirect role in influencing behavior, affect plays a central role.

The psycholinguistic and affective processing of framed health messages among younger and older adults

How health-related messages are framed can impact their effectiveness in promoting behaviors, and messages framed in terms of gains have been shown to be more effective among older adults. Recent findings have suggested that the affective response to framed messages can contribute to these effects. However, the impact of demands associated with psycholinguistic processing for different frames is not well understood. In this study, exercise-related messages were gain or loss framed and with a focus on either desirable or undesirable outcomes. Participants read these messages while their eye movements were monitored and then provided affective ratings. Older adults reacted less negatively than younger adults to loss-framed messages and messages focusing on undesirable outcomes. Eye-movement measures indicated both younger and older adults had difficulty processing the most complex messages (loss-framed messages focused on avoiding desirable outcomes). When gain-framed messages were easily processed, they engendered more positive affect, which in turn, was related to better recall. These results suggest that affective and cognitive mechanisms are interdependent in comprehension of framed messages for younger and older adults. An implication for translation to effective health communication is that simpler message framing engenders a positive reaction, which in turn supports memory for that information, regardless of age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The Appraisal Approach to Aging and Emotion: An Integrative Theoretical Framework

To advance our understanding of how emotional experience changes across the adult life span, we propose an integrative theoretical framework: the appraisal approach to aging and emotion (AAAE). AAAE posits that (a) age-related cognitive, motivational, and physical changes fundamentally change the appraisal system in certain ways, and that (b) older adults often deploy appraisal processes in different ways relative to their younger counterparts. As such, we hypothesize that these age-related changes to the appraisal process underlie the finding that older and younger adults tend to experience different emotions. In this paper we integrate findings from the aging literature with appraisal theory, grounding AAAE in theoretical and empirical work relevant to the relationship between aging and appraisal processes. Using our theoretical framework, it is possible to identify critical points of investigation for aging and emotion researchers to further develop our understanding of the proximal-level determinants of age differences in emotion.

Reactive, Agentic, Apathetic, or Challenged? Aging, Emotion, and Coping During the COVID-19 Pandemic

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Advanced age is generally associated with improved emotional well-being, but the coronavirus 2019 pandemic unleashed a global stressor that gravely threatened the physical well-being and ostensibly challenged the emotional well-being of older adults disproportionately. The current study investigated differences in emotional experiences and coping strategies between younger and older adults during the pandemic, and whether these differences were accounted for by age differences in appraisal of the pandemic.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS

We asked younger (n = 181) and older (n = 176) adult participants to report their stress, appraisals of the pandemic, emotions, and the ways in which they were coping with the pandemic.

RESULTS

Results indicated that older adults experienced less stress and less negative affect and used greater problem-focused coping and less avoidant coping in response to the pandemic than younger adults. Furthermore, age differences in affect and coping were partially accounted for by age differences in appraisals of the pandemic.

DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS

Despite their objectively higher risk of illness and death due to the pandemic, older adults experienced less negative affect and used more agentic coping strategies than younger adults.

Affective forecasting: A selective relationship with working memory for emotion

Affective forecasting (AF), the ability to predict one's future feelings, is important for decision making. We posit that AF entails the ability to maintain and evaluate an emotional feeling state, and thus requires affective working memory (AWM; Mikels & Reuter-Lorenz, 2019). To test this hypothesis, a series of studies investigated whether individual differences in AWM are related to AF ability. In the first study, we document that measures of AWM and AF are positively related, whereas an analogous measure of visual working memory is unrelated to AF in separate groups of participants. Two further within-group studies (1 preregistered) demonstrate that maintenance of affective information predicts AF performance, whereas maintenance of brightness information does not. Further, 2 additional measures of visual working memory (Corsi block-tapping and change detection) did not independently predict AF ability. Taken together the results demonstrate a reliable and selective relationship between AWM and AF, suggesting that AWM is a separable working memory subsystem and an elemental capacity that contributes to the type of higher-order emotional processes involved in AF. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Paths to positivity: the relationship of age differences in appraisals of control to emotional experience

Evidence suggests that older adults experience greater emotional well-being compared to younger adults. Appraisal theories of emotion posit that differences in emotional experience are the result of differences in appraisal. As such, age differences in appraisal may relate to age differences in emotion. To investigate this, the present study focused on appraisals of control. Research suggests that losses of control lead to greater negative affect. Therefore, older adulthood was predicted to be associated with increased appraisal of self-control and less negative affect. To investigate this idea, we used an emotionally ambiguous scenario paradigm. Older and younger participants read fourteen ambiguous scenarios, imaging themselves as the main character. After each scenario, participants appraised the scenarios on three different control dimensions: self-, other-, and circumstantial-control. Afterward, they rated their feelings toward the scenarios on seven different emotional states. The results showed that compared to younger adults, older adults appraised more self-control relative to other- and circumstantial-control, and also experienced less negative affect in response to the scenarios. Importantly, in a mediation analysis, self-control relative to other-control explained age differences in emotional reactions toward the scenarios. This finding reflects the importance of considering the role of appraisal in age differences in emotional experience.

The sure thing: The role of integral affect in risky choice framing

When faced with a decision, certain aspects of the decision itself shape our affective responses to choice options, which, in turn, influence our choices. These integral affective influences manifest as immediate feelings about choice options as well as the feelings that we anticipate we will feel after certain potential outcomes. We examined whether the effect of framing on risk taking can be explained through the mediating roles of immediate and anticipated affect. Two experiments were conducted using a gambling task. On each trial, participants were endowed a sum of money (e.g., $25) then presented with a choice between a sure option (leaving them with a portion of the initial endowment) and a gamble option (that could result in either keeping or losing the entire endowment). The sure option was framed differently across two within-participant conditions: as a gain (keep $20 from $25) or loss (lose $5 from $25). Experiment 1 examined whether immediate feelings toward choice options explain how framing the sure option as a loss versus a gain increases risk taking. Experiment 2 examined whether immediate and/or anticipated affect explain how framing guides risk taking. We found that the tendency to take risks to avoid sure losses was explained by immediate (not anticipated) affective evaluations of the sure option only. Individuals tended to take more risks when faced with sure losses due to greater negative immediate feelings that were evoked by sure losses relative to sure gains. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Me Time, or We Time? Age Differences in Motivation for Exercise

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Increasing exercise continues to be an important health issue for both older and younger adults. Researchers have suggested several methods for increasing exercise motivation. Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) posits that people's motivation shift from future-oriented instrumental goals to present-oriented emotionally meaningful goals as we age, which provides insight into how people's motivations for exercise may differ for older versus younger adults. The aim of our study was to examine how exercise motivation differs for older versus younger adults.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS

Older (greater than 59 years old) and younger (aged 18-26 years) adults participated in focus groups. They discussed exercise motivation (or lack thereof), motivators and barriers to exercise, and preferences about when, where, and with whom they exercise. Focus group transcripts were analyzed using direct content analysis and iterative categorization.

RESULTS

Consistent with SST, younger adults generally preferred to exercise alone to achieve instrumental fitness goals, whereas older adults preferred to exercise with others. Additionally, older adults tend to consider peripheral others (e.g., strangers, acquaintances), as a positive rather than a negative influence.

DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS

SST provides a framework for exploring age-related shifts in exercise motivation. Additionally, the positivity effect was reflected in how older adults evaluated the influence of peripheral others. Motivational messages could be tailored to increase health behavior changes by focusing on instrumental exercise goals for younger adults and exercise focused on meaningful relationships for older adults.

Doing What Makes You Happy: Health Message Framing for Younger and Older Adults

Background: Health-related messages, framed in terms of gains or losses, can impact decision-making differently across the adult life span. The focus of this study was on the emotional responses evoked by such framing and their relationship to perceived effectiveness, as mechanisms that may underpin how health messages impact health decisions. Methods: A web-based study using Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform was conducted with a sample of 132 younger adults and 106 older adults. Participants were asked to read exercise-related messages framed in terms of gains or losses, and to rate each message for affect and effectiveness. Results: Relative to younger adults, older adults showed less negative reactions to loss-framed messages and to messages that described undesirable outcomes. Importantly, younger and older adults differentially used affective cues to gauge effectiveness of framed messages: for gain-framed messages (which tended to evoke positive affect), older adults found messages that made them feel good to be more effective; but for loss-framed messages (which tend to evoke negative affect), younger adults found messages that made them feel bad to be more effective. Conclusions: These results suggest that in processing health messages, older adults may be more motivated by positive affect, while younger adults may be more motivated by negative affect.

Affective Working Memory: An Integrative Psychological Construct

When people ruminate about an unfortunate encounter with a loved one, savor a long-sought accomplishment, or hold in mind feelings from a marvelous or regretfully tragic moment, what mental processes orchestrate these psychological phenomena? Such experiences typify how affect interacts with working memory, which we posit can occur in three primary ways: emotional experiences can modulate working memory, working memory can modulate emotional experiences, and feelings can be the mental representations maintained by working memory. We propose that this last mode constitutes distinct neuropsychological processes that support the integration of particular cognitive and affective processes: affective working memory. Accumulating behavioral and neural evidence suggests that affective working memory processes maintain feelings and are partially separable from their cognitive working memory counterparts. Affective working memory may be important for elucidating the contribution of affect to decision making, preserved emotional processes in later life, and mechanisms of psychological dysfunction in clinical disorders. We review basic behavioral, neuroscience, and clinical research that provides evidence for affective working memory; consider its theoretical implications; and evaluate its functional role within the psychological architecture. In sum, the perspective we advocate is that affective working memory is a fundamental mechanism of mind.

Messages that matter: Age differences in affective responses to framed health messages

Age differences in responses to framed health messages-which can influence judgments and decisions-are critical to understand yet relatively unexplored. Age-related emotional shifts toward positivity would be expected to differentially impact the affective responses of older and younger adults to framed messages. In this study, we measured the subjective and physiological affective responses of older and younger adults to gain- and loss-framed exercise promotion messages. Relative to older adults, younger adults exhibited greater negative reactivity to loss-framed health messages. These results suggest that health message framing does matter, but it depends on the age of the message recipient. (PsycINFO Database Record

Adult age differences in the interpretation of surprised facial expressions

Research on adult age differences in the interpretation of facial expressions has yet to examine evaluations of surprised faces, which signal that an unexpected and ambiguous event has occurred in the expresser's environment. The present study examined whether older and younger adults differed in their interpretations of the affective valence of surprised faces. Specifically, we examined older and younger participants' evaluations of happy, angry, and surprised facial expressions. We predicted that, on the basis of age-related changes in the processing of emotional information, older adults would evaluate surprised faces more positively than would younger adults. The results indicated that older adults interpreted surprised faces more positively than did their younger counterparts. These findings reveal a novel age-related positivity effect in the interpretation of surprised faces, suggesting that older adults imbue ambiguous facial expressions-that is, expressions that lack either positive or negative facial actions-with positive meaning. (PsycINFO Database Record

At the Intersection of Emotion and Cognition

Divergent trajectories characterize the aging mind: Processing capacity declines, while judgment, knowledge, and emotion regulation are relatively spared. We maintain that these different developmental trajectories have implications for emotion–cognition interactions. Following an overview of our theoretical position, we review empirical studies indicating that (a) older adults evidence superior cognitive performance for emotional relative to non-emotional information, (b) age differences are most evident when the emotional content is positively as opposed to negatively valenced, and (c) differences can be accounted for by changes in motivation posited in socioemotional selectivity theory.

The interpretative lenses of older adults are not rose-colored--just less dark: Aging and the interpretation of ambiguous scenarios

We are all faced with ambiguous situations daily that we must interpret to make sense of the world. In such situations, do you wear rose-colored glasses and fill in blanks with positives, or do you wear dark glasses and fill in blanks with negatives? In the current study, we presented 32 older and 32 younger adults with a series of ambiguous scenarios and had them continue the stories. Older adults continued the scenarios with less negativity than younger adults, as measured by negative and positive emotion word use and by the coded overall emotional valence of each interpretation. These results illuminate an interpretative approach by older adults that favors less negative endings and that supports broader age-related positivity. In addition, older adults interpreted social scenarios with less emotionality than did younger adults. These findings uncover a new manifestation of age-related positivity in spontaneous speech generated in response to ambiguity, indicating that older adults tend to create emotional meaning differently from the young.

Meta-analysis of the age-related positivity effect: age differences in preferences for positive over negative information

In contrast to long-held axioms of old age as a time of "doom and gloom," mounting evidence indicates an age-related positivity effect in attention and memory. However, several studies report inconsistent findings that raise critical questions about the effect's reliability, robustness, and potential moderators. To address these questions, we conducted a systematic meta-analysis of 100 empirical studies of the positivity effect (N = 7,129). Results indicate that the positivity effect is reliable and moderated by theoretically implicated methodological and sample characteristics. The positivity effect is larger in studies that do not constrain (vs. constrain) cognitive processing-reflecting older adults' natural information processing preferences-and in studies incorporating wider (vs. narrower) age comparisons. Analyses indicated that older adults show a significant information processing bias toward positive versus negative information, whereas younger adults show the opposite pattern. We discuss implications of these findings for theoretical perspectives on emotion-cognition interactions across the adult life span and suggest future research directions.

Preferences for choice across adulthood: age trajectories and potential mechanisms

Across a variety of decision domains, older adults were found to desire fewer choice options than younger adults, but the age trajectory and underlying mechanisms of these effects remain unknown. The present study examined the pattern and correlates of age differences in choice set size preferences using self-report and behavioral measures. Self-reported choice set size preferences were assessed in a large-scale survey using an adult life span sample (N = 318, ages 18-90 years). A subset of younger and older adults (n = 109) also completed behavioral measures of choice preferences and information seeking. Based on prior research and theorizing on aging and decision making, we tested for a variety of possible covariates, including maximizing and decision-making self-efficacy. Combined results indicated that the age trend of choice set size preferences is linear, gradual, and domain-general. Findings also indicated a significant association between choice preferences and the extent of predecisional information search. Although age differences were evident in both self-report and behavioral measures, they were not explained by any of the covariates tested. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on aging and decision making, as well as public policy.

The dark side of intuition: aging and increases in nonoptimal intuitive decisions

When making decisions, people typically draw on two general modes of thought: intuition and reason. Age-related changes in cognition and emotion may impact these decision processes: Although older individuals experience declines in deliberative processes, they experience stability or improvement in their emotional processes. Recent research has shown that when older adults rely more on their intact emotional abilities versus their declining deliberative faculties, the quality of their decisions is significantly improved. But how would older adults fare under circumstances in which intuitive/affective processes lead to nonoptimal decisions? The ratio bias paradigm embodies just such a circumstance, offering individuals a chance to win money by drawing, say, a red jellybean from one of two dishes containing red and white jellybeans. People will often choose to draw from a dish with a greater absolute number of winners (nine red beans and 91 white beans; 9%) than a dish with a greater probability of winning (one red bean and nine white beans; 10%) due to a strong emotional pull toward the greater number. We examined whether older adults (N = 30) would make more nonoptimal decisions on the ratio bias task than young adults (N = 30). We found that older adults did make more nonoptimal choices than their younger counterparts and that positive affect was associated with nonoptimal choices.

Cerebral aging: integration of brain and behavioral models of cognitive function

There are substantial declines in behavioral measures of cognitive function with age, including decreased function of executive processes and long-term memory. There is also evidence that, with age, there is a decrease in brain volume, particularly in the frontal cortex. When young and older adults perform cognitive tasks that depend heavily on frontal function, neuroimaging evidence indicates that older adults recruit additional brain regions in order to perform the tasks. This additional neural recruitment is termed “dedifferentiation,” and can take multiple forms. This recruitment of additional neural tissue with age to perform cognitive tasks was not reflected in the behavioral literature, and suggests that there is more plasticity in the ability to organize brain function than was previously suspected. We review both behavioral and neuroscience perspectives on cognitive aging, and then connect the findings in the two areas. From this integration, we suggest important unresolved questions and directions for future research.

Letting go of the bad: deficit in maintaining negative, but not positive, emotion in bipolar disorder

Bipolar disorder is a disorder of emotion regulation. Less is known, however, about the specific processes that foster the maintenance of such prolonged and intense emotions-particularly positive-over time in this disorder. We investigated group-related differences in the ability to maintain positive and negative emotion representations over time using a previously validated emotion working memory task (Mikels et al., 2005, 2008) among individuals with bipolar I disorder (BD; n = 29) compared with both major depressive disorder (MDD; n = 29) and healthy control (n = 30) groups. Results revealed that the BD group exhibited a selective deficit in maintaining negative-but not positive-emotions compared to both the MDD and the control groups. The MDD and control groups did not differ significantly. These findings suggest that the heightened magnitude and duration of positive emotion observed in BD may, in part, be accounted for by difficulties maintaining negative emotions.

Should I go with my gut? Investigating the benefits of emotion-focused decision making

Deliberative decision strategies have historically been considered the surest path to sound decisions; however, recent evidence and theory suggest that affective strategies may be equally as effective. In four experiments we examined conditions under which affective versus deliberative decision strategies might result in higher decision quality. While consciously focusing on feelings versus details, participants made choices that varied in complexity, in extent of subsequent conscious deliberation allowed, and in domain. Results indicate that focusing on feelings versus details led to superior objective and subjective decision quality for complex decisions. However, when using a feeling-focused approach, subsequent deliberation after encoding resulted in reduced choice quality. These results suggest that affective decision strategies may be more effective relative to deliberative strategies for certain complex decisions.

Test-retest reliability of an emotion maintenance task

Research on working memory has suggested domain-specific components for visual, verbal, and spatial information, and more recently for emotion. Affective working memory has been proposed as the set of processes involved in the maintenance of emotions to guide behaviour. The current study examined the reliability of an emotion maintenance/affective working memory task over two experimental sessions separated by one week. Subjective accuracy based on individual ratings was found to correlate over time and was highest for negatively valenced pictures. Results suggest that this paradigm is a reliable measure of emotion maintenance, underscoring the utility of this measure as an assessment tool for normative and clinical populations.

Evidence for an emotion maintenance deficit in schizophrenia

Research has indicated that people with schizophrenia have deficits in reward representation and goal-directed behavior, which may be related to the maintenance of emotional experiences. Using a laboratory-based study, we investigated whether people with schizophrenia were able to maintain an emotional experience when given explicit instructions to do so. Twenty-eight people with schizophrenia and 19 people without completed a behavioral task judging their emotional experience of pictures held over a three second delay. This emotion maintenance task was compared to a subsequent in-the-moment emotion experience rating of each picture. In addition, all participants completed an analogous brightness experience maintenance and rating task, and patients completed a standardized visual working memory task. Participants with schizophrenia showed normal in-the-moment emotion experience of the emotion pictures; however, they showed decreased performance on emotion maintenance (for both positive and negative emotion) compared to participants without schizophrenia, even after controlling for brightness maintenance. The emotion maintenance deficit was not associated with visual brightness performance nor with performance on the visual working memory task; however, negative emotion maintenance was associated with an interview-based rating of motivation. These findings suggest that some aspects of impaired emotion maintenance in schizophrenia may be related to deficits in motivated behavior.

Getting the message across: age differences in the positive and negative framing of health care messages

Although valenced health care messages influence impressions, memory, and behavior (Levin, Schneider, & Gaeth, 1998) and the processing of valenced information changes with age (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005), these 2 lines of research have thus far been disconnected. This study examined impressions of, and memory for, positively and negatively framed health care messages that were presented in pamphlets to 25 older adults and 24 younger adults. Older adults relative to younger adults rated positive pamphlets more informative than negative pamphlets and remembered a higher proportion of positive to negative messages. However, older adults misremembered negative messages to be positive. These findings demonstrate the age-related positivity effect in health care messages with promise as to the persuasive nature and lingering effects of positive messages.

Following your heart or your head: focusing on emotions versus information differentially influences the decisions of younger and older adults

Research on aging has indicated that whereas deliberative cognitive processes decline with age, emotional processes are relatively spared. To examine the implications of these divergent trajectories in the context of health care choices, we investigated whether instructional manipulations emphasizing a focus on feelings or details would have differential effects on decision quality among younger and older adults. We presented 60 younger and 60 older adults with health care choices that required them to hold in mind and consider multiple pieces of information. Instructional manipulations in the emotion-focus condition asked participants to focus on their emotional reactions to the options, report their feelings about the options, and then make a choice. In the information-focus condition, participants were instructed to focus on the specific attributes, report the details about the options, and then make a choice. In a control condition, no directives were given. Manipulation checks indicated that the instructions were successful in eliciting different modes of processing. Decision quality data indicate that younger adults performed better in the information-focus than in the control condition whereas older adults performed better in the emotion-focus and control conditions than in the information-focus condition. Findings support and extend extant theorizing on aging and decision making as well as suggest that interventions to improve decision-making quality should take the age of the decision maker into account.

You never lose the ages you've been: affective perspective taking in older adults

Aging appears to be associated with a growing preference for positive over negative information (Carstensen, Mikels, & Mather, 2006). In this study, we investigated potential awareness of the phenomenon by asking older people to recollect material from the perspective of a young person. Young and older participants listened to stories about 25- and 75-year-old main characters and then were asked to retell the stories from the perspective of the main characters. Older adults used relatively more positive than negative words when retelling from the perspective of a 75- versus 25-year-old. Young adults, however, used comparable numbers of positive and negative words regardless of perspective. These findings contribute to a growing literature that points to developmental gains in the emotion domain.

Selective attention to emotion in the aging brain

A growing body of research suggests that the ability to regulate emotion remains stable or improves across the adult life span. Socioemotional selectivity theory maintains that this pattern of findings reflects the prioritization of emotional goals. Given that goal-directed behavior requires attentional control, the present study was designed to investigate age differences in selective attention to emotional lexical stimuli under conditions of emotional interference. Both neural and behavioral measures were obtained during an experiment in which participants completed a flanker task that required them to make categorical judgments about emotional and nonemotional stimuli. Older adults showed interference in both the behavioral and neural measures on control trials but not on emotion trials. Although older adults typically show relatively high levels of interference and reduced cognitive control during nonemotional tasks, they appear to be able to successfully reduce interference during emotional tasks.

Happiness unpacked: positive emotions increase life satisfaction by building resilience

Happiness-a composite of life satisfaction, coping resources, and positive emotions-predicts desirable life outcomes in many domains. The broaden-and-build theory suggests that this is because positive emotions help people build lasting resources. To test this hypothesis, the authors measured emotions daily for 1 month in a sample of students (N = 86) and assessed life satisfaction and trait resilience at the beginning and end of the month. Positive emotions predicted increases in both resilience and life satisfaction. Negative emotions had weak or null effects and did not interfere with the benefits of positive emotions. Positive emotions also mediated the relation between baseline and final resilience, but life satisfaction did not. This suggests that it is in-the-moment positive emotions, and not more general positive evaluations of one's life, that form the link between happiness and desirable life outcomes. Change in resilience mediated the relation between positive emotions and increased life satisfaction, suggesting that happy people become more satisfied not simply because they feel better but because they develop resources for living well.

Monetary losses do not loom large in later life: age differences in the framing effect

Studies of the framing effect indicate that individuals are risk averse for decisions framed as gains but risk seeking for decisions framed as losses. However, findings regarding age-related changes in susceptibility to framing are mixed. Recent work demonstrating age-related decreases in reactivity to anticipated monetary losses, but not gains, suggests that older and younger adults might show equivalent risk aversion for gains but discrepant risk seeking for losses. In the current study, older and younger adults completed a monetary gambling task in which they chose between sure options and risky gambles (the expected outcomes of which were equated). Although both groups demonstrated risk aversion in the gain frame, only younger adults showed risk seeking in the loss frame.

Older adults place lower value on choice relative to young adults

Choice is highly valued in modern society, from the supermarket to the hospital; however, it remains unknown whether older and younger adults place the same value on increased choice. The current investigation tested whether 53 older (M age = 75.44 years) versus 53 younger adults (M age = 19.58 years) placed lower value on increased choice by examining the monetary amounts they were willing to pay for increased prescription drug coverage options--important given the recently implemented Medicare prescription drug program. Results indicate that older adults placed lower value on increasing choice sets relative to younger adults, who placed progressively higher value on increasingly larger choice sets. These results are discussed regarding their implications for theory and policy.

Older adults prefer less choice than young adults

Previous research has demonstrated that older adults prefer less autonomy and seek less information when making decisions on their own relative to young adults (for a review, see M. Mather, 2006). Would older adults also prefer fewer options from which to choose? The authors tested this hypothesis in the context of different decision domains. Participants completed a choice preferences survey in which they indicated their desired number of choices across 6 domains of health care and everyday decisions. The hypothesis was confirmed across all decision domains. The authors discuss implications from these results as they relate to theories of aging and health care policy.

Emotion and working memory: evidence for domain-specific processes for affective maintenance

Working memory is comprised of separable subsystems for visual and verbal information, but what if the information is affective? Does the maintenance of affective information rely on the same processes that maintain nonaffective information? The authors address this question using a novel delayed-response task developed to investigate the short-term maintenance of affective memoranda. Using selective interference methods the authors find that a secondary emotion-regulation task impaired affect intensity maintenance, whereas secondary cognitive tasks disrupted brightness intensity maintenance, but facilitated affect maintenance. Additionally, performance on the affect maintenance task depends on the valence of the maintained feeling, further supporting the domain-specific nature of the task. The importance of affect maintenance per se is further supported by demonstrating that the observed valence effects depend on a memory delay and are not evident with simultaneous presentation of stimuli. These findings suggest that the working memory system may include domain-specific components that are specialized for the maintenance of affective memoranda.

Poignancy: mixed emotional experience in the face of meaningful endings

The experience of mixed emotions increases with age. Socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that mixed emotions are associated with shifting time horizons. Theoretically, perceived constraints on future time increase appreciation for life, which, in turn, elicits positive emotions such as happiness. Yet, the very same temporal constraints heighten awareness that these positive experiences come to an end, thus yielding mixed emotional states. In 2 studies, the authors examined the link between the awareness of anticipated endings and mixed emotional experience. In Study 1, participants repeatedly imagined being in a meaningful location. Participants in the experimental condition imagined being in the meaningful location for the final time. Only participants who imagined "last times" at meaningful locations experienced more mixed emotions. In Study 2, college seniors reported their emotions on graduation day. Mixed emotions were higher when participants were reminded of the ending that they were experiencing. Findings suggest that poignancy is an emotional experience associated with meaningful endings.

Emotional category data on images from the International Affective Picture System

The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) is widely used in studies of emotion and has been characterized primarily along the dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance. Even though research has shown that the IAPS is useful in the study of discrete emotions, the categorical structure of the IAPS has not been characterized thoroughly. The purpose of the present project was to collect descriptive emotional category data on subsets of the LAPS in an effort to identify images that elicit onediscrete emotion more than others. These data reveal multiple emotional categories for the images and indicate that this image set has great potential in the investigation of discrete emotions. This article makes these data available to researchers with such interests. Data for all the pictures are archived at www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

Differential subjective and psychophysiological responses to socially and nonsocially generated emotional stimuli

Sociality may determine the subjective experience and physiological response to emotional stimuli. Film segments induced socially and nonsocially generated emotions. Comedy (social positive), bereavement (social negative), pizza scenes (nonsocial positive), and wounded bodies (nonsocial negative) elicited four distinct emotional patterns. Per subjective report, joy, sadness, appetite, and disgust were elicited by the targeted stimulus condition. The social/nonsocial dimension influenced which emotional valence(s) elicited a skin conductance response, a finding that could not be explained by differences in subjective arousal. Heart rate deceleration was more responsive to nonsocially generated emotions. Taken together, these findings suggest that sociality affects the physiological profile of responses to emotional valence.

Divergent trajectories in the aging mind: changes in working memory for affective versus visual information with age

Working memory mediates the short-term maintenance of information. Virtually all empirical research on working memory involves investigations of working memory for verbal and visual information. Whereas aging is typically associated with a deficit in working memory for these types of information, recent findings suggestive of relatively well-preserved long-term memory for emotional information in older adults raise questions about working memory for emotional material. This study examined age differences in working memory for emotional versus visual information. Findings demonstrate that, despite an age-related deficit for the latter, working memory for emotion was unimpaired. Further, older adults exhibited superior performance on positive relative to negative emotion trials, whereas their younger counterparts exhibited the opposite pattern.

A split-brain model of Alzheimer's disease?

It has been proposed that features of Alzheimer-type dementia (AD) reflect a breakdown in cortical connectivity that can be likened to a disconnection syndrome. One hypothesized consequence of this pathology is that AD patients should be disproportionally impaired on measures of interhemispheric transfer. However, there is a paucity of studies bearing on this prediction. We report the results from two measures of interhemispheric interaction obtained from healthy younger and older adults, and older adults with probable AD. One measure examined speeded simple manual responses to a lateralized light flash (i.e., the Poffenberger task) and the other examined the interhemispheric coordination of computational resources using within and across hemifield variants of visual letter-matching tasks. AD patients show an overall impairment of performance on both intra and interhemispheric conditions in all tasks. However, there is no indication of disproportionate alteration of interhemispheric processes mediating either visuomotor transfer or visual letter-matching and the allocation of computational resources. The results, therefore, call into question the appropriateness of a "split-brain" model for AD, at least in the domain of visual processing. Although the results are not specifically diagnostic of a disconnection syndrome, they are consistent with the possibility of a breakdown of cortico-cortical connectivity both within and between the hemispheres in AD.

A cross-culturally standardized set of pictures for younger and older adults: American and Chinese norms for name agreement, concept agreement, and familiarity

The present study presents normative measures for 260 line drawings of everyday objects, found in Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980), viewed by individuals in China and the United States. Within each cultural group, name agreement, concept agreement, and familiarity measures were obtained separately for younger adults and older adults. For a subset of 57 pictures (22%), there was equivalence in both name agreement and concept agreement, and for an additional subset of 29 pictures (11%), there was nonequivalent name agreement but equivalent concept agreement, across all culture-by-age groups. The data indicate substantial differences across culture-by-age groups in name agreement percentages and number of distinct name responses provided. We discovered significant differences between older and younger American adults in both name agreement percentages (67 pictures, or 26%) and concept agreement percentages (44 pictures, or 17%). Written naming responses collected for the entire set of Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures showed shifts in both naming and concept agreement percentages over the intervening decades: Although correlations in name agreement were strong (r = .71, p < .001) between our younger American samples and those of Snodgrass and Vanderwart, name agreement percentages have changed for a substantial proportion (33%) of the 260 pictures; moreover, 63% of the stimuli for which Snodgrass and Vanderwart reported concept agreement now appear to differ. We provide comprehensive comparison statistics and tests for both the present study and prior ones, finding differences across numerous item-level measures. The corpus of data suggests that substantial differences in all measures can be found across age as well as culture, so that unequivocal conclusions with respect to cross-cultural or age-related differences in cognition can be made only when appropriate stimuli are selected for studies. Data for all 260 pictures, for each of the four groups, and all supporting materials and tests are freely archived at http://agingmind.cns.uiuc.edu/Pict_Norms. The full set of these norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

Neural Gate Keeping: The Role of Interhemispheric Interactions in Resource Allocation and Selective Filtering

The corpus callosum has been proposed to contribute to attention by modulating resource allocation between the hemispheres and filtering interhemispheric signal transmission (M. T. Banich, 1998). The resource allocation hypothesis predicts that interhemispheric interactions become more advantageous with increasing resource demands. The selective filtering hypothesis predicts that interhemispheric interactions become less advantageous as filtering requirements increase. The authors tested both predictions by comparing within- and across-hemisphere letter matching under dual-task (Experiment 1) and selective attention conditions (Experiment 2). Task-specific resource demands (i.e., letter processing load) alter the bihemispheric advantage, but the general demand imposed by an unrelated secondary task does not. Filtering requirements influenced the advantage from interhemispheric interactions, providing new evidence for the role of the corpus callosum in selective attention.