Do older adults get more distracted by happy than sad pictures?
Older adults were quicker to judge positive than negative pictures they were looking at, but pictures they were told to ignore did not show any age-related positive bias.
Source
Processing Distracting Non-face Emotional Images: No Evidence of an Age-Related Positivity Effect
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Two computerised flanker experiments comparing young and older adults: Exp 1 required valence judgments of a central IAPS picture flanked by congruent, neutral or incongruent pictures (distractors task-relevant); Exp 2 required finding the odd digit in a three-digit array flanked by positive, neutral or negative pictures at easy or hard difficulty (distractors task-irrelevant)
- N
- Separate samples per experiment after exclusions: Exp 1, 27 older and 25 young adults; Exp 2, 26 older and 30 young adults
- Population
- Community-dwelling older adults (about 63-90 years, screened for cognitive impairment and depression) and university students aged about 18-30 in New Zealand
- Outcome
- Correct response times and accuracy as a function of distractor valence, target valence and task difficulty
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Young and older adults responded to a central target while ignoring two identical emotional pictures from a standard picture set shown above and below it. In Experiment 1 the target was also an emotional picture and people had to say whether it was positive or negative, so the flanking pictures' emotion was relevant to the task. In Experiment 2 the target was a row of three digits and people had to find the odd one out, so the flanking pictures' emotion was irrelevant, and trials were either easy or hard.
What they found
In Experiment 1 both age groups were slowed when the flanking pictures had the opposite valence to the target, but neither group was disrupted more by positive than by negative distractors. Older adults, unlike young adults, responded faster to positive than to negative targets (about 894 versus 992 ms). In Experiment 2 the emotional flankers did not affect performance in either age group, even on easy trials, although older adults were slower overall and slowed more on hard trials.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Samples were small (roughly 25-30 per age group per experiment) and the older adults were healthy, well-educated volunteers, so the results may not hold for frailer older people. Face and scene stimuli were never compared in the same study, so the authors can only speculate that earlier positivity effects for ignored faces reflect something special about faces or about placing the distractor at fixation. Neutral pictures were less arousing than emotional ones, and the study measured only reaction times, so it cannot rule out later effects such as better memory for positive distractors.
Key terms
- Age-related positivity effect
- The tendency for older adults, relative to young adults, to favour positive over negative information in attention and memory.
- Socioemotional selectivity theory
- The theory that as people perceive their remaining time as limited they prioritise emotionally meaningful goals, such as maintaining positive mood.
- Flanker task
- A task in which people respond to a central target while ignoring surrounding items; slowing from mismatching flankers shows the flankers were processed.
- Task relevance
- Whether a distractor shares the feature that the task requires judging; relevant distractors are more likely to interfere.
- Interference effect
- Slower or less accurate responding when a distractor conflicts with the target, compared with a neutral distractor.
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Quiz yourself
In Experiment 1, what made the distractor pictures task-relevant?
Common questions
Why does it matter that the older adults were faster for positive targets but not more distracted by positive flankers?
It suggests the positivity effect depends on controlled, attended processing; information outside the focus of attention is not automatically sorted in favour of positive content.
Earlier studies found older adults were distracted by happy faces. Why the difference?
The authors suggest faces may be uniquely hard to ignore, and in the earlier work the face sat behind the target at fixation rather than in the periphery; this study did not test either explanation directly.
Were older adults simply more distractible overall?
No. When the pictures' emotion was irrelevant to the digit task, neither older nor young adults were affected by them, even on easy trials.
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