Processing Bias Of Emotional Information—Study Of Positivitv Effect In The Elderly

Many research proved that the elderly have the positivity effect in processing of the emotional information, with the age increasing, the elderly appears a downward trend in physically and some mental function, but they can maintain a good level at the emotional aspects, even better than the younger, the elderly increasingly take notice of positive information and decreasingly remember negative information than the younger. Process are mainly concentrated on the study of positivity effect on the emotional information of two dimensions:attention and memory, by comparing the old and the young people of emotional information processing bias, indirect discuss the positivity effect of the elderly.Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST) is the most influential explanation about the positivity effect, the theory point out that individual’s two goals of social behavior in life are acquire knowledge and emotion regulation, the younger give priority to acquire knowledge, while the elderly are turning to give priority to with emotion regulation, therefore the elderly pay more attention to the emotional experience, at the same time, in order to get higher experience of happiness, they would to selective processing emotional information.However, the existing results about the positivity effect are not consistent, there are different results under different cultural background and experimental material, some studies doesn’t draw the result of their positivity effects, especially under the background of Chinese culture, it is still have a big controversy about the positivity effect. This study recruited Chinese youth and old subject, using different stimulus materials to explore whether exist the positivity effect in the elderly in China.The first experiment used words classified selection paradigm, the stimulus material is emotional words, we asked participants to complete the word classification task, and then they would complete the free recall task. Participants are 30 younger and 30 elderly. The results discovered that both groups of participants showed a positive bias at words selection phase, namely they choose more positive words; while at free recall phase, both groups showed emotional bias, namely the participants recalled more emotional words than neutral words, include positive words and negative words.The second experiment used Dot-probe paradigm, the stimulus materials are China’s mood face images, we asked the participants to complete the Dot-probe task, and then to complete the recognition task. The results discovered that both groups of participants didn’t show any bias on the two indicators, reaction time and response bias points, at the dot-probe reaction stage; while at recognition stage, both groups showed emotional bias, namely the participants recalled more emotional images than neutral images.There are also some controversy in evaluation way about the positivity effect, Carstensen et al. defined the positivity effect as a tendency that individual will increase process of positive information or decrease process of negative information. At the same time, there are three emotional bias hpyothesis to get the elderly positivity effect by Langeslag:(1) Young people have no emotional bias, the elderly have a positive bias; (2) Young people have a negative bias, old people have no emotional bias; (3) Young people have a negative bias, at the same time, the elderly have a positive bias. This study combined with two kinds of assessment model, we found youth and elderly basically show consistent emotional bias.Experimental results manifested that China’s elderly didn’t show the positivity effect, the elderly only show some emotional bias as the same as the youth. The positivity effect has not been verified at least in the context of Chinese culture, it is not a common phenomenon.