Now you feel it, now you don't: Motivated attention to emotional content is modulated by age and task demands.

Abstract

Several studies with younger adults have examined the degree to which emotion captures attention using the event-related potentials (ERP) technique, but it is unknown whether there are age-related differences on this issue. We examined ERP correlates of age-related differences in processing of task-relevant and task-irrelevant emotional material. Participants viewed emotional or neutral images, presented at fixation, flanked by two bars of either differing or matching orientation. In one set of trials, participants decided whether the pictures were presented in black-and-white or color; in another set of trials, they made a match/judgment on the flanking bars. Before the experiment proper, we determined each individual's threshold for line orientation (in the presence of neutral pictures at fixation); mismatch bar stimuli were constructed using this threshold, thus equating baseline performance on the bar tasks across individuals. When attention was focused on the images, ERPs provided evidence for emotion-based processing in the younger group, regardless of valence; older adults showed more differentiated valence-based processing as reflected by a positivity effect (in line with socioemotional selectivity theory). When the images were task-irrelevant, older adults showed no evidence of emotional processing whatsoever; younger adults showed a pattern of suppression in the form of reduced processing of emotional material relative to neutral images. These findings suggest that, once performance on a neutral baseline task is equated, older adults do not exhibit a specific age-related deficit in inhibiting emotional material; they also suggest qualitative differences in processing of to-be-ignored emotional material in younger and older adults.