Older Adults' Preference for Emotional Information: Is Hedonic Valence Everything

Research on emotional cognition has identified an age-related positivity effect among older adults, that is, older adults show higher preference for positive over negative information compared to their younger counterparts. The socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) and Cognitive Control Model interpret the positivity effect as the result of controlled cognitive processes guided by emotionally meaningful goals among older adults. A large amount of studies under the SST framework, however, equates emotionally meaningful goals with emotion-regulatory goals to pursue emotional happiness.;The current thesis aims to examine whether emotional happiness or meaningfulness (i.e., a sense of meaning) is more important in shaping age differences in emotional preference. I manipulated emotional happiness by changing the emotional valence (i.e., positive, neural or negative) of pictorial stimuli, and manipulated meaningfulness by changing the culture-relevance (i.e., Chinese culture which is relevant to the participants or Western culture which is less relevant to the participants) of the stimuli.;Study 1 employed the ERP technique to examine the viability of this new method of manipulation of meaningfulness, as well as the time-course of culture-relevance processing. I recruited 18 Chinese students (9 females; 19.82+/-1.29 years old) to complete an oddball emotion-categorization task where positive Chinese, negative Chinese, positive Western, and negative Western pictures were embedded in the sequences of emotionally and culturally neutral pictures. Participants were asked to judge the valence of the pictures, and their EEG signal was recorded during the task. The results showed that emotional valence had a main effect (i.e., larger N1 amplitudes for negative than positive pictures regardless of culture-relevance) at the early time-course of information processing; culture-relevance interacted with emotional valence at the later time-course to influence the late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes. The results suggested that the variation of culture-relevance altered the cognitive processing of information in a relatively slow, top-down manner.;In Study 2, a total number of 116 younger and 127 older adults were divided and assigned to four experiments to learn and recognize pictures varying in valence (positive/ neutral/ negative) and culture-relevance (Chinese/ Western). The four experiments adopted the same procedures and pictures, but with different instructions asking the participants to make certain judgments. In the experiment where the participants passively viewed the pictures (Experiment 1) and the experiment where participants judged the emotional valence of pictures (Experiment 2), the age-related positivity effect was detected regardless of the culture-relevance of pictures. In the experiment that asked the participants to judge the culture-relevance of pictures (Experiment 3), I did not find the age-related positivity effect, but found that younger adults displayed a culturerelevance preference for negative pictures (i.e., a preference for negative Chinese over negative Western pictures), whereas older adults displayed a culture-relevance for positive and neutral pictures. In the experiment which asked the participants to judge both the emotional valence and culture-relevance (Experiment 4), there was an age-related positivity effect for Chinese pictures but not for Western pictures.;The studies demonstrate that emotional valence is not all that determines age differences in emotional preference during information processing; instead, the effect of emotional valence may be moderated or even replaced by meaningfulness (e.g., culturerelevance).