It is not always positive: emotional bias in young and older adults.

Abstract

Healthy ageing has been associated with a bias toward positive information and greater psychological well-being. However, to what extent this positivity bias also applies to prioritizing positive information under emotional competition is unclear. Old and young adults performed a word-face interference task, in which they responded to the valence of positive and negative target-words while ignoring happy or angry distractor-faces that could be affectively congruent or incongruent. A control condition with scrambled neutral distractor-faces was also used. Findings showed small facilitation effects with faster responses when targets and distractors were affectively congruent and large interference effects with slower responses when targets and distractors were affectively incongruent compared to the control condition. Importantly, whereas for younger adults there was a similar pattern of interference from happy and angry distractor-faces, for older adults there was greater interference from angry distractor-faces. The present findings are discussed in the context of emotional bias literature.