Abstract
Despite ample support for enhanced affective well-being and emotional stability in healthy aging, the role of potentially important dimensions, such as the emotional arousal, has not been systematically investigated in neuroimaging studies. In addition, the few behavioral studies that examined effects of arousal have produced inconsistent findings. The present study manipulated the arousal of pictorial stimuli to test the hypothesis that preserved emotional functioning in aging is modulated by the level of arousal, and to identify the associated neural correlates. Young and older healthy participants were presented with negative and neutral pictures, which they rated for emotional content, while fMRI data were recorded. There were three main novel findings regarding the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of negative pictures with different levels of arousal in young and older adults. First, the common engagement of the right amygdala in young and older adults was driven by high arousing negative stimuli. Second, complementing an age-related reduction in the subjective ratings for low arousing negative pictures, there were opposing patterns of activity in the rostral/ventral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the amygdala, which showed increased vs. decreased responses, respectively, to low arousing negative pictures. Third, increased spontaneous activity in the ventral ACC/ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in older adults was linked to reduced ratings for low arousing negative pictures. Overall, these findings advance our understanding of the neural correlates underlying processing of negative emotions with different levels of arousal in the context of enhanced emotional functioning in healthy aging. Notably, the results support the idea that older adults have emotion regulation networks chronically activated, in the absence of explicit induction of the goal to regulate emotions, and that this effect is specific to low arousing negative emotions.
Highlights
Aging is associated with well-known co-morbidities and losses, and with relatively high levels of emotional well-being
These findings suggest the possibility of age-related differential engagement of the amygdala by stimuli with different levels of arousal, but again such manipulation has not been previously used in conjunction with brain imaging recordings
In the present study, we examined the effect of arousal as a potential factor influencing the enhanced affective well-being and emotional stability commonly associated with healthy aging
Summary
Aging is associated with well-known co-morbidities and losses, and with relatively high levels of emotional well-being. The idea of relatively well-preserved emotional processing in aging is supported by evidence showing that older adults tend to (a) pay attention to and remember more positive information (Charles et al, 2003; Mather and Carstensen, 2003; Isaacowitz et al, 2006) and (b) show reduced processing of negative information compared to young adults (Wood and Kisley, 2006; Gruhn et al, 2007). Empirical evidence shows that these two emotional dimensions are not independent of each other (Ito et al, 1998; Lang et al, 1998; Libkuman et al, 2007; but see Ribeiro et al, 2007) Rather, they form a V (“boomerang”)-shaped function, with the unpleasant pictures tending to be more highly arousing than pleasant stimuli, and both pleasant and unpleasant pictures being more arousing than neutral stimuli. A study examining age-differences in the relation between valence and arousal ratings www.frontiersin.org
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