Positive Gaze Preferences in Older Adults: Assessing the Role of Cognitive Effort with Pupil Dilation

ABSTRACT Older adults display positive preferences in their gaze, consistent with their prioritization of emotion regulation goals. While some research has argued that substantial amounts of cognitive effort are necessary for these information-processing preferences to occur, other work suggests that these attentional patterns unfold with minimal cognitive exertion. The current study used an implicit regulatory context (i.e., viewing facial stimuli of varying emotions) to assess how much cognitive effort was required for positive attentional preferences to occur. Effortful cognitive processing was assessed with a direct measure of change in pupil dilation. Results indicated that minimal cognitive effort was expended when older adults engaged in positive gaze preferences. This finding suggests that gaze acts as a rather effortless and economical regulatory tool for individuals to shape their affective experience.

[1]  L. Carstensen.  The Influence of a Sense of Time on Human Development , 2006, Science.

[2]  L. Phillips,et al.  Emotional Development across Adulthood: Differential Age-Related Emotional Reactivity and Emotion Regulation in a Negative Mood Induction Procedure , 2007, International journal of aging & human development.

[3]  Corinna E. Löckenhoff,et al.  Age differences in recognition of emotion in lexical stimuli and facial expressions. , 2007, Psychology and aging.

[4]  Edward B. Royzman,et al.  Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion , 2001 .

[5]  J. Henry,et al.  A meta-analytic review of emotion recognition and aging: Implications for neuropsychological models of aging , 2008, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

[6]  L. Carstensen,et al.  Taking time seriously. A theory of socioemotional selectivity. , 1999, The American psychologist.

[7]  R. Adolphs.  Neural systems for recognizing emotion , 2002, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[8]  Patricia A Reuter-Lorenz,et al.  Divergent trajectories in the aging mind: changes in working memory for affective versus visual information with age. , 2005, Psychology and aging.

[9]  D. Isaacowitz,et al.  Use of gaze for real-time mood regulation: effects of age and attentional functioning. , 2009, Psychology and aging.

[10]  Laura L. Carstensen,et al.  At the Intersection of Emotion and Cognition , 2005 .

[11]  Leslie G. Ungerleider,et al.  Neuroimaging Studies of Attention: From Modulation of Sensory Processing to Top-Down Control , 2003, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[12]  Mara Mather,et al.  Aging and Attentional Biases for Emotional Faces , 2003, Psychological science.

[13]  K. Vohs,et al.  Case Western Reserve University , 1990 .

[14]  L. Pessoa.  To what extent are emotional visual stimuli processed without attention and awareness? , 2005, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[15]  C. Carver,et al.  On the Self-Regulation of Behavior , 1998 .

[16]  T. Salthouse.  Resource-reduction interpretations of cognitive aging☆ , 1988 .

[17]  M. Lawton,et al.  Dimensions of affective experience in three age groups. , 1992, Psychology and aging.

[18]  L. Carstensen,et al.  Emotional experience in everyday life across the adult life span. , 2000, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[19]  D. Isaacowitz,et al.  Aiming at Happiness: How Motivation Affects Attention to and Memory for Emotional Images , 2006 .

[20]  L. Carstensen,et al.  Emotion and aging: experience, expression, and control. , 1997, Psychology and aging.

[21]  Lester M. Hyman,et al.  Which are the stimuli in facial displays of anger and happiness? Configurational bases of emotion recognition. , 1992 .

[22]  Mara Mather,et al.  Aging and goal-directed emotional attention: distraction reverses emotional biases. , 2007, Emotion.

[23]  Caught by the evil eye : nonconscious information processing, emotion, and attention to facial stimuli , 2005 .

[24]  A. Wingfield,et al.  Pupillometry as a measure of cognitive effort in younger and older adults. , 2010, Psychophysiology.

[25]  L. Pessoa.  On the relationship between emotion and cognition , 2008, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[26]  H. Wilson,et al.  Looking While Unhappy , 2008, Psychological science.

[27]  Tammy English,et al.  Amygdala Responses to Emotionally Valenced Stimuli in Older and Younger Adults , 2004, Psychological science.

[28]  H. Wilson,et al.  Is there an age-related positivity effect in visual attention? A comparison of two methodologies. , 2006, Emotion.

[29]  D Kahneman,et al.  Pupil Diameter and Load on Memory , 1966, Science.

[30]  Richard J. Davidson,et al.  Individual Differences in Amygdala and Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Activity are Associated with Evaluation Speed and Psychological Well-being , 2007, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[31]  Lynn Hasher,et al.  The influence of emotional valence on age differences in early processing and memory. , 2006, Psychology and aging.

[32]  S. Steinhauer,et al.  Sympathetic and parasympathetic innervation of pupillary dilation during sustained processing. , 2004, International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology.

[33]  P. Ekman,et al.  Emotion, physiology, and expression in old age. , 1991, Psychology and aging.

[34]  A. Kleinschmidt,et al.  Effects of arousing emotional scenes on the distribution of visuospatial attention: changes with aging and early subcortical vascular dementia , 2005, Journal of the Neurological Sciences.

[35]  Heather L. Urry,et al.  Amygdala and Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Are Inversely Coupled during Regulation of Negative Affect and Predict the Diurnal Pattern of Cortisol Secretion among Older Adults , 2006, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[36]  J. Gross.  The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Review , 1998 .

[37]  Gunter Loffler,et al.  Synthetic faces, face cubes, and the geometry of face space , 2002, Vision Research.

[38]  Corinna E Löckenhoff,et al.  Aging, emotion, and health-related decision strategies: motivational manipulations can reduce age differences. , 2007, Psychology and aging.

[39]  D. Isaacowitz,et al.  Preferences for emotional information in older and younger adults: a meta-analysis of memory and attention tasks. , 2008, Psychology and aging.

[40]  M. Mather,et al.  Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory , 2005, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[41]  J. Gross,et al.  The cognitive control of emotion , 2005, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[42]  J. Mikels,et al.  Aging and the Intersection of Cognition, Motivation, and Emotion , 2006 .

[43]  Hugh R. Wilson,et al.  Selective preference in visual fixation away from negative images in old age? An eye-tracking study. , 2006, Psychology and aging.

[44]  W. S. Peavler,et al.  Pupil size, information overload, and performance differences. , 1974, Psychophysiology.

[45]  F. Paas,et al.  Memory load and the cognitive pupillary response in aging. , 2004, Psychophysiology.

[46]  Mara Mather,et al.  Goal-directed memory: the role of cognitive control in older adults' emotional memory. , 2005, Psychology and aging.

[47]  H. Wilson,et al.  Quantifying facial expression recognition across viewing conditions , 2006, Vision Research.

[48]  D. Isaacowitz,et al.  Age-related differences in profiles of mood-change trajectories. , 2011, Developmental psychology.

[49]  D. Isaacowitz,et al.  Are Preferences in Emotional Processing Affected by Distraction? Examining the Age-Related Positivity Effect in Visual Fixation within a Dual-Task Paradigm , 2008, Neuropsychology, development, and cognition. Section B, Aging, neuropsychology and cognition.

[50]  Mara Mather,et al.  The Role of Motivation in the Age-Related Positivity Effect in Autobiographical Memory , 2004, Psychological science.

[51]  M. Mather,et al.  Aging and emotional memory: the forgettable nature of negative images for older adults. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[52]  N. Meiran,et al.  Divergent cognitive costs for online forms of reappraisal and distraction. , 2008, Emotion.

[53]  E. Gordon,et al.  Defining the temporal threshold for ocular fixation in free-viewing visuocognitive tasks , 2003, Journal of Neuroscience Methods.

[54]  C. Carver,et al.  On the Self-Regulation of Behavior , 1998 .

[55]  Bruce D. McCandliss,et al.  Testing the Efficiency and Independence of Attentional Networks , 2002, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[56]  A. Bandura.  Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory , 1985 .