Dataset Information

Affective Influences on Older Adults' Attention to Self-Relevant Negative Information.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

Some research suggests that older adults have a tendency to be biased toward positive information, but may be more willing to attend to potentially beneficial negative information in certain situations. Following the mood-as-resource framework, one possibility is that older adults may be more willing to consider negative information when in a positive mood, with positive affect serving as a buffer to the adverse emotional consequences that may follow.

Method

Young (n = 62) and older (n = 65) adults completed a difficult cognitive task before completing either a positive or negative experience recall task, depending upon assigned condition. Afterwards, they rated their interest in viewing their strengths and weaknesses on the previously completed task, and then selected and viewed different types of feedback (i.e., strengths or weaknesses).

Results

Older adults in the positive condition selected more weaknesses to view and spent more time viewing weaknesses than older adults in the negative condition. There were no differences across conditions in behavioral results for young adults. Ratings of interest in viewing different types of feedback did not correspond with actual feedback viewing behavior.

Discussion

Results highlight the importance of considering older adults' pre-existing mood before addressing self-relevant information that may be negative but important.

SUBMITTER: Growney CM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6460333 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Affective Influences on Older Adults' Attention to Self-Relevant Negative Information.

Growney Claire M CM Hess Thomas M TM

The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences 20190401 4

<h4>Objectives</h4>Some research suggests that older adults have a tendency to be biased toward positive information, but may be more willing to attend to potentially beneficial negative information in certain situations. Following the mood-as-resource framework, one possibility is that older adults may be more willing to consider negative information when in a positive mood, with positive affect serving as a buffer to the adverse emotional consequences that may follow.<h4>Method</h4>Young (n = ...[more]

PMID: 30977513

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Project description:Perception of time is susceptible to distortions; among other factors, it has been suggested that the perceived duration of a stimulus is affected by the observer's expectations. It has been hypothesized that the duration of an oddball stimulus is overestimated because it is unexpected, whereas repeated stimuli have a shorter perceived duration because they are expected. However, recent findings suggest instead that fulfilled expectations about a stimulus elicit an increase in perceived duration, and that the oddball effect occurs because the oddball is a target stimulus, not because it is unexpected. Therefore, it has been suggested that top-down attention is sometimes sufficient to explain this effect, and sometimes only necessary, with an additional contribution from saliency. However, how the expectedness of a target stimulus and its salient features affect its perceived duration is still an open question. In the present study, participants' expectations about and the saliency of target stimuli were orthogonally manipulated with stimuli presented on a short (Experiment 1) or long (Experiment 2) temporal scale. Four repetitive standard stimuli preceded each target stimulus in a task in which participants judged whether the target was longer or shorter in duration than the standards. Engagement of top-down attention to target stimuli increased their perceived duration to the same extent irrespective of their expectedness. A small but significant additional contribution to this effect from the saliency of target stimuli was dependent on the temporal scale of stimulus presentation. In Experiment 1, saliency only significantly increased perceived duration in the case of expected target stimuli. In contrast, in Experiment 2, saliency exerted a significant effect on the overestimation elicited by unexpected target stimuli, but the contribution of this variable was eliminated in the case of expected target stimuli. These findings point to top-down attention as the primary cognitive mechanism underlying the perceptual extraction and processing of task-relevant information, which may be strongly correlated with perceived duration. Furthermore, the scalar properties of timing were observed, favoring the pacemaker-accumulator model of timing as the underlying timing mechanism.

Dataset Information

Affective Influences on Older Adults' Attention to Self-Relevant Negative Information.

Objectives

Method

Results

Discussion

Publications

Affective Influences on Older Adults' Attention to Self-Relevant Negative Information.

Similar Datasets

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