| Older adults exhibit a positivity effect in emotion processing, seemingly focusing more on positive than negative information. Whether this reflects purposeful behavioral changes or an unintended side-effect of declining cognitive abilities is unclear. To shed light on this issue, 66 older adults displaying a wide range of cognitive abilities completed neuropsychological measures of attention, visual and verbal memory, executive functioning, and processing speed, as well as socioemotional measures of affect and time perspective. Regression analyses examined the ability of these variables to predict emotion processing, as measured by an emotion recognition task and an electrophysiological measure of neural responsivity to positive and negative images. Weaker cognitive functioning was consistently associated with decreased processing of negative information. These findings suggest that age-related changes in cognitive abilities account for at least some of the so-called positivity effects observed in older adults' emotion processing. |
