Use of gaze for real-time mood regulation: effects of age and attentional functioning.

Older adults show positive preferences in their gaze toward emotional faces, and such preferences appear to be activated when older adults are in bad moods. This suggests that age-related gaze preferences serve a mood regulatory role, but whether they actually function to improve mood over time has yet to be tested. We investigated links between fixation and mood change in younger and older adults, as well as the moderating role of attentional functioning. AgexFixationxAttentional Functioning interactions emerged such that older adults with better executive functioning were able to resist mood declines by showing positive gaze preferences. Implications for the function of age-related positive gaze preferences are discussed.

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

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

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

[4]  D. Wechsler.  Manual for the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. , 1955 .

[5]  S. Koole.  The psychology of emotion regulation: An integrative review , 2009 .

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

[7]  Janet Metcalfe,et al.  Mood Dependent Memory for Internal Versus External Events , 1989 .

[8]  F. Blanchard-Fields,et al.  The experience of anger and sadness in everyday problems impacts age differences in emotion regulation. , 2008, Developmental psychology.

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

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

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

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

[13]  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.

[14]  D. Pfaff,et al.  Molecular and biophysical mechanisms of arousal, alertness, and attention. Preface. , 2008, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[15]  M. Posner.  Measuring Alertness , 2008, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[16]  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.

[17]  Morris Moscovitch,et al.  Cognitive resources, valence, and memory retrieval of emotional events in older adults. , 2008, Psychology and aging.

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

[19]  Jin Fan,et al.  A symbolic model of human attentional networks , 2004, Cognitive Systems Research.

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