Abstract
The present study investigated age-related differences in emotional processing by using a paradigm of affective priming. Eighteen, right-handed, younger (mean age 22) and 15 older (mean age 68) subjects pressed buttons to indicate pleasantness of target words. The valence of each prime-target pair was congruent (e.g., win-love), incongruent (e.g., love-loss), or neutral (time-flower). Two sets of 720 prime-target pairs used either affective words or pictures as primes, and affect words as targets. We included well-matched positive and negative valence pairs in all congruent, neutral, and incongruent conditions, and controlled for possible contamination by semantic meaning, word frequency, and repetition effects. The response time (RT) results revealed that young participants responded faster to the targets in affectively congruent conditions than in incongruent conditions. In older participants, the responses to target words were indifferent to all valence congruency conditions. The age effect in affective priming largely reflects reduced sensitivity to affective mismatches among older adults. Intriguingly, emotional Stroop effect and some perceptual priming have been linked to increased interferences and mismatches in older adults. The age-related changes in affective, perceptual, and semantic processes are discussed.
Highlights
Cognitive impairment in older adults and dementia patients is often accompanied by changes in mood and affective processing
All the target words were selected from Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; [43])
Whether the prime was a picture or word did not produce any significant difference in reaction times to target words (p > 0.10; Fig.2)
Summary
Cognitive impairment in older adults and dementia patients is often accompanied by changes in mood and affective processing. The time needed to evaluate a target word as either affectively “positive” or “negative” is shorter when prime and target words are affectively congruent (positive-positive or negative-negative) than when they are affectively incongruent (positive-negative). This effect is referred to as affective priming[6,7,8]. Researchers in psychology and clinical neuroscience have applied tasks of affective priming (prime-target) as tools for studying emotional processing of normal, healthy, young adults[6,9,10,11,12,13], schizophrenia patients[14], and patients with neuroticism[15]
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