Positive Effects Of Pre-attentional Processing Of Emotional Information And The Impact Of Implicit Attitudes In Older Adults

With the increase of age,the physical function and cognitive ability of the elderly tend to decline,but their emotional ability and mental health level can be maintained at a good level,even better than those of the young.In the field of attention,the elderly has showed an attention preference for emotional materials and an attention preference for positive emotional materials,which to some extent indicated that the elderly has had a positivity effect on the selective attention.However,the researches on the positivity effect of attention in the elderly mainly focus on the late stage of intentional attention and ignore the early pre-attention process.Preattention occurs in the early stages of attention and is an important part of the attention process.The environment in which humans live is rich and colorful,and this information changes rapidly.The human brain needs to process changing information.Preattentional bias can help individuals screen out meaningful stimuli for further processing.So,has the positive effect of attention processing in the elderly already appeared in the pre-attention stage?The experiment uses the oddball paradigm,combined with the high time resolution of ERP technology,and examines the time course characteristics and processing mechanism of the attention bias of the elderly in the pre-attention stage.In addition,previous studies have suggested that implicit attitudes can affect individuals' attention bias towards relevant stimuli.Compared with those with expressive implicit attitude,individuals with implicit attitude of controlling emotion regulation can automatically control and regulate emotions in an unconscious state,showing lower negative emotional experience and physiological response.The researches of emotion regulation have proposed that the allocation of attention is also an important way of automatic emotion regulation.Therefore,the difference in the effect of emotion regulation between the two implicit attitudes of emotion regulation may be caused by the different allocation of their early attention to the stimulus.Therefore,it is of great significance to investigate the influence of the emotional implicit attitudes of the elderly on preattentional bias.The conclusions of this study not only provide empirical evidence for previous theoretical controversies about the positivity effect of the elderly,but also provide new ideas for exploring the influencing factors of the positivity effect of the elderly's attention field.Experiment 1 used a mixed experimental design of 2(age group:elderly group,young group)× 2(emotional valence:positive,negative).The pre-attention bias of the elderly and the young to emotional information in the pre-attention stage was compared.The EEG results showed that in the early stage of 150-250ms,the amplitude of eMMN induced by negative faces in young people was more negative than that induced by positive faces,while there was no difference in the amplitude of eMMN induced by positive and negative stimuli in the elderly.The EEG results at the late stage of 250-350ms showed that young people had a larger amplitude of eMMN induced by negative faces,while the elderly had a larger amplitude of eMMN induced by positive faces.In experiment 2,the ER-IAT test were used to distinguish the type of emotion regulation implicit attitude in the elderly.The elderly can be divided into two types:the implicit attitude of controlled emotion regulation and the implicit attitude of expressive emotion regulation.Experiment adopted 2(category of the implicit attitude:controlling emotion regulation of implicit attitude,expressing emotion regulation of implicit attitude)× 2(emotional valence:positive and negative)of mixed experimental design,comparing the attention bias of two kinds of the elderly people with different implicit attitudes in the pre-attention stage.EEG results showed that in the early stage of 150-250ms,the amplitude of eMMN induced by negative faces was larger in the elderly with expressive implicit attitude,while there was no difference in the amplitude of eMMN induced by positive faces and negative faces in the elderly with controlling implicit attitude.In the late stage of 250-350ms,the amplitude of eMMN induced by negative faces was larger in the elderly with the expressive implicit attitude,while the amplitude of eMMN induced by positive faces was larger in the elderly with the controlling implicit attitude.Combining the main results of experiment 1 and experiment 2,this study found that:in the early stage of pre-attention processing,the young people would preferentially detect the negative change stimuli,while the old people had no significant difference in the response to the positive or negative face stimuli.In the late stages of pre-processing emotional information,older people responded more strongly to positive faces,while younger people respond more strongly to negative faces.Therefore,in the process of pre-attention processing of emotional information,the elderly showed a positivity effect compared with the young.In addition,not all the elderly showed positivity effects in the processing of preattentional bias.Among them,the old people with the implicit attitude of controlling emotion regulation tended to show positivity effect in the early pre-attention,while the old people with the implicit attitude of expressing emotion regulation were more affected by the negative face.In conclusion,the main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)compared with the young people,the pre-attention processing of the emotional information of the elderly has a positivity effect;(2)the implicit attitude of emotion regulation can affect the positivity effect of pre-attention processing in the elderly.Among them,individuals with the controlling implicit attitude show a positive bias towards positive faces in pre-attention stage,while those with the expressive implicit attitude show a preattention bias towards negative faces.