Mindfulness and action control in young, middle-aged, and old adults: an examination of their relationship to attentional bias towards emotional information

Abstract

The aim of the study was to investigate the relationships of the self-regulatory dispositions of mindfulness and action control with attentional bias towards emotional information in young, middle-aged, and old adults. The participants (N = 185) were 69 young adults (M = 24.7 years; SD = 5.0), 67 middle-aged adults (M = 47.3 years; SD = 7.6), and 49 old adults (M = 73.4 years; SD = 5.6) of both genders. They were divided into three educational levels (low, middle, high) according to the years of education. An emotional color-word interference test (EC-WIT) was designed by the authors to investigate attentional bias towards (a) positively toned and (b) negatively toned information, and it was used along with self-report measures of dispositional mindfulness and action-state orientation. The results indicated that age was related to slower reaction times (RTs) for the two conditions of the EC-WIT, while the higher the level of education the faster the RTs. Decision-related action orientation was associated with a decreasing level of negativity bias in early attention orienting only in young adults. Mindfulness was associated with a decreasing level of attentional bias towards emotional information, either positive or negative, only in middle-aged adults.