Aiming at Happiness: How Motivation Affects Attention to and Memory for Emotional Images

Abstract

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (Carstensen, L. L., Isaacowitz, D. M., & Charles, S. T. (1999). American Psychologist, 54, 155–181) posits that older adults, and anyone else who perceives their time as limited, show a motivational shift toward emotion regulation which causes them to exhibit a positivity bias and negativity avoidance in attention and memory. We tested whether such a motivational shift can indeed cause changes in emotional processing by manipulating motivation in a sample of young adults. After the manipulation, participants looked at real-world images while their eye movements were tracked. It was found that participants motivated to regulate emotion attended less to negative than positive images and showed less looking time to all stimulus types compared to the other two conditions. No evidence was found linking the motivational manipulation to emotional memory.