Abstract
Older adults have been found to focus more on positive and less on negative information compared to younger adults. Yet, results on this attentional positivity effect are inconsistent. Since personality has been related to attentional processing in younger adults, we explored whether (mal)adaptive personality traits are also linked to the occurrence of the positivity effect measured with eye tracking paradigms. We performed two studies with different experimental tasks and recruited for each study 60 community dwelling younger (aged 24–50) and 60 older (age 65–91) adults. We found some indication for a positivity effect with a free-viewing task (study 2), but not with a task measuring engagement and disengagement with emotional information (study 1). Although this effect should be interpreted with caution, it corroborates evidence that the positivity effect is more robust in situations without cognitive constraints. No evidence was found for personality traits to be related to the occurrence of the effect. Further research is needed to further clarify conditions that influence older adults’ attention for emotional information.
Highlights
The last decades, an extensive amount of research has focused on the occurrence of the positivity effect in healthy older adults [1]
Besides trying to corroborate the positivity effect under different attention conditions, we investigated the relationship between personality traits and attentional processing of emotional stimuli in older adults compared to younger adults
Based on the theoretical relevance of attention for emotional information to specific personality characteristics and the results of earlier studies [15, 16, 17, 18], we mainly focused on neuroticism and extraversion
Summary
The last decades, an extensive amount of research has focused on the occurrence of the positivity effect in healthy older adults [1]. The most often used age for defining older adults is from 65, but mean ages in previous studies ranged from as low as 64.4 years to as high as 81.1 years, with age ranges from 60 to 93. Most often student samples have been used, a few studies used slightly older, community-dwelling younger adults (age range from 18 to 39) and found positivity effects in the older adult groups in comparison with the younger group, with distraction tasks, viewing tasks and memory recall [3, 4, 5]. Researchers began to investigate under which circumstances the effect does or does not occur and what the possible
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