The 'Positive Effect' is present in older Chinese adults: evidence from an eye tracking study.

Jingxin Wang,Liyuan He,Liping Jia,Valerie Benson,Jing Tian,Marianna Mazza

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0121372

Jingxin Wang, Liyuan He + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0121372

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Apr 16, 2015
Citations: 8	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Tianjin Normal University, University of Southampton

Abstract

The 'Positive Effect' is defined as the phenomenon of preferential cognitive processing of positive affective information, and avoidance or dismissal of negative affective information in the social environment. The ‘Positive Effect’ is found for older people compared with younger people in western societies and is believed to reflect a preference for positive emotional regulation in older adults. It is not known whether such an effect is Universal, and in East Asian cultures, there is a highly controversial debate concerning this question. In the current experiment we explored whether Chinese older participants showed a 'Positive Effect' when they inspected picture pairs that were either a positive or a negative picture presented with a neutral picture, or a positive and negative picture paired together. The results indicated that both groups of participants showed an attentional bias to both pleasant (more processing of) and unpleasant pictures (initial orienting to) when these were paired with neutral pictures. When pleasant and unpleasant pictures were paired together both groups showed an initial orientation bias for the pleasant picture, but the older participants showed this bias for initial orienting and increased processing measures, providing evidence of a ‘Positive Effect’ in older Chinese adults.

Highlights

Subjective well-being is an important comprehensive index to measure individual life quality, and is defined as the overall evaluation for the quality of the life according to the standard which individual’s set themselves
We summarised the data from the interest areas by calculating the index of the probability of the first fixation landing in an interest area; the amount of time looking in that area before moving to the alternative picture and the number of fixations made to an interest area from first fixating it and before leaving that area
On target) are observed when unpleasant pictures are paired with neutral pictures, whereas initial orienting effects are absent when pleasant and neutral pictures are paired

Summary

Introduction

Subjective well-being is an important comprehensive index to measure individual life quality, and is defined as the overall evaluation for the quality of the life according to the standard which individual’s set themselves. Life satisfaction and emotional experience are two basic elements of subjective well-being [1]. There are reasons to believe that subjective well-being should decline as people get older since both physical health and cognitive abilities decline as the amount of lifetime remaining decreases [2]. The frequency of experiencing negative emotions decreases throughout most of adulthood, and levels off around the age of 60 [3] resulting in the 'Positive Effect'. The 'Positive Effect' refers to the preferential cognitive processing of positive stimuli relative to negative stimuli as people get older.

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