Are preferences in emotional processing affected by distraction? Examining the age-related positivity effect in visual fixation within a dual-task paradigm

Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition

Volumn 15, Issue 6, 2008, Pages 725-743

  Allard, Eric S ^a   Isaacowitz, Derek M ^a  

^a BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Cognitive control; Distraction; Dual task performance; Emotion; Eye tracking

Indexed keywords

ADULT; AGE; AGED; AROUSAL; ARTICLE; ATTENTION; COGNITION; EMOTION; EYE FIXATION; EYE TRACKING; FEMALE; HUMAN; HUMAN EXPERIMENT; IMAGE ANALYSIS; MALE; NORMAL HUMAN; TASK PERFORMANCE;

ADOLESCENT; ADULT; AGED; AGED, 80 AND OVER; AGING; ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE; ATTENTION; EMOTIONS; FEMALE; FIXATION, OCULAR; HUMANS; MALE; MIDDLE AGED; NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL TESTS; PHOTIC STIMULATION; REACTION TIME; YOUNG ADULT;

EID: 55749106058     PISSN: 13825585     EISSN: 17444128     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13825580802348562     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. Anderson, N. D., Craik, F. I. M., & Naveh-Benjamin, M. (1998). The attentional demands of encoding and retrieval in younger and older adults: 1. Evidence from divided attention costs. Psychology and Aging, 13, 405-423.
2. Beckett, L. A., Brock, D. B., Lemke, J. H., Mendes de Leon, C. F., Guralnik, J. M., Fillenbaum, C. G. et al. (1996). Analysis of change in self-reported physical function among older persons in four population studies. American Journal of Epidemiology, 143, 766-778.
3. Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Fickenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5, 323-370.
4. Bradley, M. M., & Lang, P. J. (1999). Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW): Instruction manual and affective ratings. Technical Report C-1, The Center for Research in Psychophysiology, University of Florida.
5. Cacioppo, J. T., Gardner, W. L., & Berntson, G. G. (1997). Beyond bipolar conceptualizations and measures: The case of attitudes and evaluative space. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 1, 3-25.
6. Carstensen, L. L., & Charles, S. T. (1998). Emotion in the second half of life. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7, 144-149.
7. Carstensen, L. L., Isaacowitz, D. M., & Charles, S. T. (1999). Taking time seriously: A theory of socioemotional selectivity. American Psychologist, 54, 165-181.
8. Carstensen, L. L., & Lang, F. R. (1996). Future Orientation Scale. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA.
9. Carstensen, L. L., & Mikels, J. A. (2005). At the intersection of emotion and cognition: Aging and the positivity effect. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14, 117-121.
10. Carstensen, L. L., Mikels, J. A., & Mather, M. (2006). Aging and the intersection of cognition, motivation, and emotion. In J. E. Birren, & K. W. Schaie (Eds.), Handbook of the psychology of aging (6th ed., pp. 343-362). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
11. Carstensen, L. L., Pasupathi, M., Mayr, U., & Nesselroade, J. R. (2000). Emotional experience in everyday life across the adult life span. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 644-655.
12. Caseras, X., Garner, M., Bradley, B. P., & Mogg, K. (2007). Biases in visual orienting to negative and positive scenes in dysphoria: An eye movement study. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 116, 491-497.
13. Charles, S. T., Mather, M., & Carstensen, L. L. (2003). Aging and emotional memory: The forgettable nature of negative images for older adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 132, 310-324.
14. Craik, F. I. M. (1983). On the transfer of attention from temporary to permanent memory. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series, B302, 341-359.
15. Craik, F. I. M., Anderson, N. D., Kerr, S. A., & Li, K. Z. H. (1995). Memory changes in normal aging. In A. D. Baddeley, B. A. Wilson, & F. N. Watts (Eds.), Handbook of memory disorders (pp. 211-241). Chichester, UK: Wiley.
16. Craik, F. I. M., & Byrd, M. (1982). Aging and cognitive decline: The role of attentional resources. In F. I. M. Craik, & S. Trehub (Eds.), Aging and cognitive processes (pp. 191-211). New York: Pelnum.
17. Fan, J., McCandliss, B. D., Sommer, T., Raz, A., & Posner, M. I. (2002). Testing the efficiency and independence of attentional networks. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, 340-347.
18. Folstein, M. F., Folstein S. E., & McHugh, P. R. (1975). 'Mini-mental state': A practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 12, 189-198.
19. Fried, L. P., Tangen, C. M., Walston, J., Newman, A. B., Hirsch, C., Gottdiener, J. et al. (2001). Frailty in older adults: Evidence for a phenotype. The Journals of Gerontology. Series A, Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, 56, M146-M156.
20. Germain, C. M., & Hess, T. M. (2007). Motivational influences on controlled processing: Moderating distractibility in older adults. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 14, 462-486.
21. Hahn, S., Carlson, C., Singer, S., & Gronlund, S. D. (2006). Aging and visual search: Automatic and controlled attentional bias to threat faces. Acta Psychologica, 123, 312-336.
22. Isaacowitz, D. M. (2005). The gaze of the optimist. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 3, 407-415.
23. Isaacowitz, D. M., Allard, E. S., Murphy, N. A., & Schlangel, M. (2008). Unraveling agerelated gaze preferences to positive stimuli: Time course and correlates. Manuscript submitted for publication.
24. Isaacowitz, D. M., Wadlinger, H. A., Goren, D., & Wilson, H. R. (2006a). Is there an agerelated positivity effect in visual attention? A comparison of two methodologies. Emotion, 6, 511-516.
25. Isaacowitz, D. M., Wadlinger, H. A., Goren, D., & Wilson, H. R. (2006b). Selective preference in visual fixation away from negative images in old age? An eye tracking study. Psychology and Aging, 21, 40-48.
26. Ito, T. A., Larsen, J. T., Smith, K., Cacioppo, J. T. (1998). Negative information weighs more heavily on the brain: The negativity bias in evaluative categorizations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 887-900.
27. Kennedy, Q., Mather, M., & Carstensen, L. L. (2004). The role of motivation in the agerelated positivity effect in autobiographical memory. Psychological Science, 15, 208-214.
28. Knight, M., Seymour, T. L., Gaunt, J. T., Baker, C., Nesmith, K., & Mather, M. (2007). Aging and goal directed emotional attention: Distraction reverses emotional biases. Emotion, 7, 705-714.
29. Lang, P. J., Bradley, M. M., & Cuthbert, B. (1999). International affective picture system (IAPS): Technical manual and affective ratings. The Center for Research in Psychophysiology, University of Florida.
30. Lavie, N. (2004). Distracted and confused?: Selective attention under load. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 75-82.
31. Lawton, M. P., Kleban, M. H., Rajagopal, D. (1992). Dimensions of affective experience in three age groups. Psychology and Aging, 7, 171-184.
32. Lien, M. C., Allen, P. A., Ruthruff, E., Grabbe, J., McCann, R. S., Remington, R. W. (2006). Visual word recognition without central attention: Evidence for greater automaticity with advancing age. Psychology and Aging, 21, 431-447.
33. Madden, D. J. (2007). Aging and visual attention. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 70-74.
34. Madden, D. J., Whiting, W. L., Cabeza, R., & Huettel (2004). Age-related preservation of top-down attentional guidance during visual search. Psychology and Aging, 19, 304-309.
35. Madden, D. J., Whiting, W. L., Spaniol, J., & Bucur, B. (2005). Adult age differences in implicit and explicit components of top-down attentional guidance during visual search. Psychology and Aging, 20, 317-329.
36. Manor, B. R., & Gordon, E. (2003). Defining the temporal threshold for ocular fixation in free-viewing visuocognitive tasks. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 128, 85-93.
37. Mather M., & Carstensen, L. L. (2003). Aging and attentional biases for emotional faces. Psychological Science, 14, 409-415.
38. Mather M., & Knight, M. (2005). Goal directed memory: The role of cognitive control in older adults' emotional memory. Psychology and Aging, 20, 554-570.
39. Mather, M., & Knight, M. (2006). Angry faces get noticed quickly: Threat detection is not impaired among older adults. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 61B, P54-P57.
40. McCann, R. S., Remington, R. W., & Van Selst, M. (2000). A dual-task investigation of automaticity in visual word processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 26, 1352-1370.
41. Mechelli, A., Gorno-Tempini, M. L., & Price, C. J. (2003). Neuroimaging studies of word and pseudoword reading: Consistencies, inconsistencies, and limitations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15, 260-271.
42. Mikels, J. A., Larkin, C. R., Reuter-Lorenz, P. A., & Carstensen, L. L. (2005). Divergent trajectories in the aging mind: Changes in working memory for affective versus visual information with age. Psychology and Aging, 20, 542-553.
43. Mroczek, D. K., & Kolarz, C. M. (1998). The effect of age on positive and negative affect: A developmental perspective on happiness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 1333-1349.
44. Murphy, N. A., & Isaacowitz, D. M. (2008). Preferences for emotional information for younger and older adults: A meta-analysis of memory and attention tasks. Psychology and Aging, 23, 263-286.
45. Naveh-Benjamin, M., Craik, F. I. M., Guez, J., & Krueger, S. (2005). Divided attention in younger and older adults: Effects of strategy and relatedness on memory performance and secondary task costs. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 520-537.
46. Radloff, L. S. (1977). The CES-D scale: A self-report depression scale for research in the general population. Applied Psychological Measurement, 1, 385-401.
47. Rozin, P., & Rozyman, E. B. (2001). Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5, 296-320.
48. Scheier, M. F., & Carver, C. S. (1985). Optimism, coping, and health: Assessment and implication for generalized coping expectancies. Health Psychology, 4, 219-247.
49. Smith, K. N., Larsen, J. T., Chartrand, T. L., Cacioppo, J. T., Katafiasz, H. A., & Moran, K. E. (2006). Being bad isn't always good: Affective context moderates the attention bias toward negative information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 210-220.
50. Stoltzfus, E. R., Hasher, L., & Zacks, R. T. (1996). Working memory and aging: Current status of the inhibitory view. In J. T. E. Richardson, R. W. Engle, L. Hasher, R. H. Logie, E. R. Stoltzfus, & R. T. Zacks (Eds.), Working memory and human cognition (pp. 66-88). New York: Oxford University Press.
51. Thomas, R. C., & Hasher, L. (2006). The influence of emotional valence on age differences in early processing and memory. Psychology and Aging, 21, 821-825.
52. Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Development, 54, 1063-1070.
53. Wegener, D. T., & Petty, R. E. (1994). Mood management across affective states: The hedonic contingency hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 1034-1048.
54. Weschler, D. (1981). Manual for the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale - Revised. New York: Psychological Corp.
55. Whiting, W. L. (2003). Adult age differences in divided attention: Effects of elaboration during memory encoding. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 10, 141-157.
56. Xing, C., & Isaacowitz, D. M. (2006). Aiming at happiness: How motivation affects attention to and memory for emotional images. Motivation and Emotion, 30, 249-256.
57. Zachary, R. (1986). Shipley Institute of Living Scale, Revised Manual. Los Angeles: Western Psychological Services.