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Atlanta, GA | Posted: August 22, 2019
Audrey Duarte, Associate Professor of Psychology
Summary Sentence:
School of Psychology Grad Student Brittany Corbett published in August issue of Cerbral Cortex
Full Summary:
Preparing for the worst: Evidence that older adults proactively downregulate negative affect
Briefly, with age, there is generally an increased ability to regulate emotions, which may contribute to greater memory for positive events and emotional well being typical of older adults. This "positivity effect" has been shown in imaging studies in response to positive events but it isn't clear whether older adults can spontaneously engage in emotional regulation when they anticipate experiencing negative events, such as emotionally preparing for an upcoming root canal, for example. Brittany's study is the first to provide evidence that the “positivity effect” seen in older adults’ memory performance may be related to the spontaneous emotional suppression of negative affect in anticipation of, not just in response to, negative stimuli.
Cerebral CortexPreparing for the worst: Evidence that older adults proactively downregulate negative affect Brittany Corbett, M Natasha Rajah, Audrey Duarte
Previous studies have only investigated age-related differences in emotional processing and encoding in response to, not in anticipation of, emotional stimuli. In the current study, we investigated age-related differences in the impact of emotional anticipation on affective responses and episodic memory for emotional images. Young and older adults were scanned while encoding negative and neutral images preceded by cues that were either valid or invalid predictors of image valence. Participants were asked to rate the emotional intensity of the images and to complete a recognition task. Using multivariate behavioral partial least squares (PLS) analysis, we found that greater anticipatory recruitment of the amygdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), and hippocampus in older adults predicted reduced memory for negative than neutral images and the opposite for young adults. Seed PLS analysis further showed that following negative cues older adults, but not young adults, exhibited greater activation of vmPFC, reduced activation of amygdala, and worse memory for negative compared with neutral images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to provide evidence that the “positivity effect” seen in older adults’ memory performance may be related to the spontaneous emotional suppression of negative affect in anticipation of, not just in response to, negative stimuli.
