Aging and Motivated Cognition: The Positivity Effect in Attention and Memory

Abstract

As people get older, they experience fewer negative emotions. Strategic processes in older adults' emotional attention and memory might play a role in this variation with age. Older adults show more emotionally gratifying memory distortion for past choices and autobiographical information than younger adults do. In addition, when shown stimuli that vary in affective valence, positive items account for a larger proportion of older adults' subsequent memories than those of younger adults. This positivity effect in older adults' memories seems to be due to their greater focus on emotion regulation and to be implemented by cognitive control mechanisms that enhance positive and diminish negative information. These findings suggest that both cognitive abilities and motivation contribute to older adults' improved emotion regulation.

Full text

Aging and motivated cognition:
the positivity effect in attention
and memory
Mara Mather
1
and Laura L. Carstensen
2
1
Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA
2
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94035, USA
As people get older, they experience fewer negative
emotions. Strategic processes in older adults’ emotional
attention and memory might play a role in this variation
with age. Older adults show more emotionally gratifying
memory distortion for past choices and autobiographical
information than younger adults do. In addition, when
shown stimuli that vary in affective valence, positive
items account for a larger proportion of older adults’
subsequent memories than those of younger adults.
This positivity effect in older adults’ memories seems to
be due to their greater focus on emotion regulation and
to be implemented by cognitive control mechanisms
that enhance positive and diminish negative informa-
tion. These findings suggest that both cognitive abilities
and motivation contribute to older adults’ improved
emotion regulation.
Introduction
There are reasons to believe that well-being should decline
as people get older. Physical health and cognitive abilities
decline and the amount of lifetime remaining decreases.
Yet the frequency of negative affect (emotions) decreases
throughout most of adulthood and levels off around age 60
[1–3]. Positive affect remains largely stable across adult
lifetime, although some studies show modest increases [3]
or slight decreases [2] with age. Thus, the ratio of positive
to negative affect improves through adulthood. What might
explain this surprising observation across the same years
that physical and cognitive health declines? In this article,
we review recent findings that suggest that a greater focus
on emotional goals among older adults lead them to favor
positive and avoid negative information in their attention
and memory. Interactions between emotion and cognition,
although important to understand at all ages, might be
particularly relevant for understanding and improving
cognitive performance in older adults.
Cognitive control declines with age
Perhaps the most widely acknowledged psychological
change with age is the decline in cognitive processes,
especially memory. However, not all cognitive processes
decline with age – not even all types of memory. One
general characterization is that older adults have
impaired cognitive control that is associated with deterior-
ation in prefrontal brain regions [4,5]. Thus, older adults
show deficits on attention and memory tasks that require
the generation and maintenance of internal strategies
rather than just reliance on external cues [6–8]. For
example, explicit recall of words studied a few minutes
previously was shown to decline across a four-year period
whereas implicit memory of recently studied words did not
show a decline with age [9].
Emotion regulation improves with age
In contrast with the declines seen in cognitive control, age
does not impair emotional control. Compared with
younger adults, older adults report that they focus more
on selfcontrol of their emotions and rate their emotion-
regulation skills as better [10,11]. When dealing with an
upsetting interpersonal situation, older adults report
being less likely to engage in destructive behavioral
responses such as shouting or name calling [12]. A study
that sampled participants’ moods at random intervals
over the course of a week found that when participants
experienced a negative mood, it was less likely to persist to
the next sampling occasion among older adults than
younger adults, suggesting that older adults are able to
dissipate negative affect more effectively than younger
adults are [1].
Research with younger adults suggests that mechan-
isms used to regulate emotions are implemented by some
of the same brain regions as mechanisms used to control
cognition [13]. On the face of it, this seems paradoxical
[14]. How could it be that older adults are more effective
emotion regulators than younger adults but less effective
in cognitive control processes involved in encoding and
retrieving memories? One possibility is that although
there are significant declines in strategic control processes
with age, there are also shifts in how people allocate these
processes in their everyday lives [15]. For example, the
under-recruitment of frontal brain regions observed in
older adults is eliminated when they are given instruc-
tions to use particular strategies (e.g. [16]), suggesting
that at least some of the presumed aging deficits reported
in the literature reflect behavioral shifts as much as
fundamental neural deterioration.
Corresponding author: Mather, M. (mather@ucsc.edu).
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Resource allocation, of course, implicates motivation.
Why might people allocate more resources towards
regulating emotion as they age? Socio emotional selectiv-
ity theory (see Box 1) is a lifespan theory of motivation
that posits shifts in the priorities of different goals with
age because time horizons become increasingly con-
strained [17]. As people approach the end of life, goals
associated with emotional meaning and well-being become
more salient whereas goals associated with acquiring
knowledge for future use become less so.
Older adults’ attention shows signs of emotion
regulation
We fully attend to only a small portion of what is happening
around us and often fail to process information that is not
consistent with current goals [18]. Older adults’ greater
focus on regulating emotion is therefore likely to change
what they pay attention to. A study supporting this
possibility used a dot-probe task, in which one emotional
and one neutral face appeared side by side on a computer
screen for 1 s [19]. When the faces disappeared, a dot
appeared behind one of the faces. Older adults were slower
to indicate which side dots were on when they appeared
behind negative faces than behind neutral faces, and faster
when they appeared behind positive faces than neutral faces
(Figure 1). By contrast, younger adults did not show any
attentional biases for the faces. Age differences in atten-
tional biases also influence which features of choice options
people focus on. For example, when given a chart with
information about several models of car (e.g. whether the
gas mileage is good or bad) and asked which car they would
choose, older adults spend a larger proportion of their time
reviewing the positive features and a smaller proportion of
their time reviewing the negative features than younger
adults do [20] (Figure 2).
Although dwelling on negative stimuli might put one in
a bad mood, it is important to detect threatening stimuli
quickly. Studies with younger adults indicate that they
detect threatening information more quickly than other
types of information [21]. Do the age differences in emo-
tional attention reflect a decline in older adults’ ability to
detect threatening information quickly? A study using a
visual search task suggests not [22]. Participants were
shown a series of arrays of nine schematic faces and had to
indicate whether the faces in each array were all the same
or not. Half the time all the faces were neutral and half the
time there was one emotional face in the array. As in
previous studies [23], younger adults were faster to detect
discrepant faces when the facial expressions were angry
than when they were sad or happy. But older adults also
showed the same advantage for the threatening faces,
indicating that the detection advantage for threatening
stimuli is maintained among older adults.
Automatic versus controlled processes
Across the various studies discussed so far, it appears that
there is no age difference in the likelihood of noticing
threatening information but that older adults do not dwell
Box 1. Socioemotional selectivity theory
Socioemotional selectivity theory maintains that time horizons
influence goals. When time is perceived as open-ended, goals are
most likely to be preparatory, for example, gathering information,
experiencing novelty and expanding breadth of knowledge. When
constraints on time are perceived, goals focus more on objectives
that can be realized in their very pursuit. Under these conditions,
goals emphasize feeling states, particularly regulating emotional
states to optimize well-being.
As an example of socioemotional selectivity theory, age differences
in goals are seen whenparticipants are asked whom theywould like to
spend time with. Younger adults are more likely to chose social
partners that offer new information, such as a book author, whereas
older adults are more likely to chose social partners likely to satisfy
emotionalgoals, such as close friends or familymembers [67,68].Time
perspective is not a fixed characteristic, however, so younger adults
with terminal illnesses or those who are simply asked to imagine an
impending geographical relocation emphasize emotional goals as
much as older adults [68,69]. Likewise, if older adults are asked to
imagine that medical advances would offer them much longer lives,
they are more likely to show preferences revealing knowledge-seeking
goals than if they are not asked to imagine this situation [67].
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences
Younger
Attentional bias score
Positive faces
Negative faces
+
•
–25
–20
–15
–10
–5
0
5
10
15
20
25 Older
(a) (b)
Time
Figure 1. (a) The display in the dot-probe task [19]. After a fixation cross, two faces appeared simultaneously side by side, one emotional face (here on the left) and one neutral
face (right). When the faces disappear, a dot appears in the place of one of the faces and participants are asked to respond on the basis of the emotional valence of that face.
(b) Attentional bias scores of younger and older groups of adults. Positive scores indicate faster responses to dot appearing behind emotional faces than behind neutral faces.
Older adults showed higher scores to positive faces and lower scores to negative faces than younger adults. Error bars show the standard error of the mean.
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on negative information. A study using eyetracking
supports this distinction between initial detection and
sustained attention [24]. When a negative and a neutral
picture were displayed together, both younger and older
adults were more likely to glance initially at the negative
picture. But younger adults looked longer at the negative
pictures than the older adults did. By contrast, there were
no age differences when the two pictures were positive and
neutral; both age groups showed greater sustained
attention to the positive than the neutral picture.
Both automatic and controlled processes influence
attention to emotional stimuli [25]. Goal-directed control
processes help select information to attend to or to ignore.
However, potentially threatening or aversive stimuli
receive preferential processing even when attention is
limited, indicating that emotion can direct attention even
when one’s current goals are directed elsewhere. As
outlined in Table 1, we hypothesize that emotional atten-
tion and memory reveal age differences when goal directed
controlled processes are involved, but not when only
automatic processes contribute to the effects.
In summary, the literature on emotional attention and
aging suggests that automatic emotional attention processes,
such as threat detection, change little with age. By contrast,
attentional processes that are more influenced by top-down
control reveal age differences in which older adults attend
more to positive information than negative information.
Older adults’ memory also shows influence of emotion
regulation
Like attention, memory is selective. As attended infor-
mation is more likely to be remembered than nonattended
information, initial attention provides one filter of the
incoming information stream [26]. Older adults’ atten-
tional biases reviewed in the previous section should
therefore influence what gets encoded. Goals also influ-
ence how memories are reconstructed later [27–30],so
emotional goals would be expected to lead older adults to
distort their memories in a positive direction more than
younger adults.
Memory for choices and emotional stimuli
These possibilities are supported by findings from studies
that examined age differences in emotional memory. In
one study, groups of younger and older adults were asked
to make a series of hypothetical choices, each between
two options that had some positive and some negative
features [31]. When remembering past choices, one way to
regulate emotion is to remember one’s chosen option as
having more good features than the rejected options did.
When later asked to indicate which option features had
been associated with, older adults showed more choice
supportive memory than younger adults, attributing more
positive features to chosen options and more negative
features to rejected options. However, if younger adults
were asked to focus on their feelings after making the
choices, their later memories were just as choice sup-
portive as those of older adults. Thus, younger adults do
not seem to focus on emotional goals unless reminded to
do so by some external cue.
Age differences are also sometimes found in memory for
emotional pictures [32], words [33] and faces [19,34]. For
instance, when participants viewed a picture slide show
without any instructions about how to encode the pictures,
an age by valence interaction occurred in later recall and
recognition [32]. Although older adults were less likely to
remember the pictures overall, the age difference was
greatest for the negative pictures and smallest for the
positive pictures (Figure 3). These positivity effects were
consistent across men and women, African- and European-
Americans, and people of low and high socioeconomic status.
One recent study of working memory for emotional material
(Mikels, Larkin, Reuter-Lorenz and Carstensen, unpub-
lished) indicates that in some cases, positivity effects can
even lead older adults to show superior memory perform-
ance than younger adults. In this study, older adults
outperformed younger adults when the working memory
task involved positive stimuli whereas younger adults
outperformed older adults when the task involved negative
stimuli.
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences
Negative
Positive
Proportion of viewing time
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
Younger Older
Figure 2. Total viewing time of older and younger adults for positive and negative
car option features, when asked to choose a car [20]. Error bars show the standard
error of the mean.
Table 1. Automatic vs controlled processes affecting emotional attention and memory
Nature of
emotional
influence on
cognition
Associated brain regions Impact of emotion-regulation goals Relevance for emotional attention Relevance for emotional memory
Automatic,
bottom-up
Amygdala: shows
relatively little decline
with age [14,61,62]
None or very little Arousing (especially threatening)
information is noticed quickly by both
younger and older adults, no age
differences seen in this threat/arousal
detection advantage [22,24]
Enhancement in memory for arousing
stimuli is as large for older adults as it is
for younger adults [32,36–38]
Goal-directed, top-
down, subject to
cognitive control
Prefrontal brain regions:
show significant decline
with age, reducing
cognitive control
abilities [4,5]
Significantly affected by emotional
goals; extent of influence of these goals
is constrained by the effectiveness of
cognitive control processes
Older adults attend less to negative
stimuli and as much or more to positive
stimuli as younger adults do [19,20,24]
A smaller proportion of what older
adults remember is negative [19,32–34]
and their memories are more likely to
be distorted in a positive direction
[31,39,40,42]
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By contrast, some studies that examined memory for
emotional stimuli found no interactions of valence and age
[35–37] or only a marginally significant one [38]. One
possibility is that the specific encoding tasks given in these
studies (typically to rate or focus on the emotional
characteristics of the stimuli) limited the influence of
emotional goals. Open-ended encoding sessions might be
more likely to show the effects of emotional goals. It also
seems likely that the more personally relevant the
information is, the more likely older adults would be to
attempt to implement emotion-regulation goals when
processing the information.
Autobiographical memory
Of course, the most personally relevant type of memory
is autobiographical. Several studies reveal positivity
effects in older adults’ autobiographical memories. A
study that examined memory for a political candidate’s
withdrawal from an election race found that older adults
were more likely than younger adults to forget the
intensity of their negative affect [39]. In another study,
when asked to recall positive and negative events from
their past and rate the characteristics of those memories,
older adults indicated higher levels of positive feelings
and less complexity associated with negative memories
than younger adults did [40], consistent with previous
findings that older adults use positive reappraisal as a
strategy to cope with stressful encounters more often than
younger adults do [41].
A greater focus on emotional goals when remembering
also seems to influence the direction of distortion when
people reconstruct past health and habits. Among several
hundred nuns who recalled health behaviors and daily
habits from 14 years ago, the direction of memory
distortion became more positive with age [42]. However,
in another group that rated their current emotions every
so often during the memory questionnaire, both older and
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences
Number of images recalled
Positive
Negative
Neutral
0
1
2
3
4
5
Young Middle-aged Old
(b)(a)
(c)
(d)
Figure 3. (a) Total number of pictures recalled by younger (18–29 years old), middle-aged (41–53 years old), and older (65–80 years old) adults [32]; examples of (b) positive,
(c) neutral and (d) negative pictures seen in the experiment. Error bars show the confidence interval for the age-by-valence interaction.
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences
Direction of memory bias
Accuracy Youngest
controls Oldest
controls Emotion
–25
–20
–15
–10
–5
0
5
10
15
20
25
Figure 4. Degree of positive or negative memory distortion for nuns answering
various questions about their health and well-being 14 years ago [42]. For example,
the nuns were asked, ‘How often were you completely worn out at the end of the
day?’ and ‘How often did you experience happiness?’ Participants in the control
condition simply filled out the memory questionnaire. In the accuracy condition,
they were repeatedly queried about the memory strategies they were using and in
the emotion condition they were repeatedly queried about their current emotions
as they completed the questionnaire. The bias scores reflect a comparison of the
nuns’ remembered health and well-being to their actual ratings 14 years ago.
Memories that were more positive than the actual ratings yielded positive scores
whereas those that were more negative yielded negative scores. Error bars show
the standard error of the mean.
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younger nuns put a positive spin on their past health and
personal habits (Figure 4). Thus, as previously shown in
the study of memory for choices [31], reminding younger
adults to pay attention to their current emotional state
can lead them to show the same positivity effect in memory
as older adults. Conversely, in a condition in which
participants were induced to focus on memory accuracy,
both younger and older nuns showed a negative bias in
their memories (Figure 4). Evidently, the goals that are
most salient at the time of retrieval can influence the
valence of memories for both younger and older adults, but
when not explicitly focused on any goal, older adults are
more likely than younger adults to engage in emotion
regulation strategies during the retrieval process. This
suggests that emotion-regulation goals are chronically
activated among older adults, but only activated in certain
contexts for younger adults (for discussions of chronic
accessibility of goals, see [43,44]).
In this study of nuns [42], completing the autobio-
graphical memory questionnaire improved mood for the
older group and the ‘emotion-focussed’ group, but not for
the younger control group or ‘memory accuracy’ group.
Thus, remembering things in a positive light can be an
effective emotion-regulation strategy. Such positivity
biases in memory are likely to be an important factor
contributing to the increase in positive affect seen with
age. For example, in an study that sampled experiences
from participants’ lives, increases in positive affect across
the lifespan were seen for social occasions that involved
reminiscing, but there were no age differences for affect in
the other social occasions [45].
A long-term benefit?
It is possible that these benefits resulting from positive
memory biases might be only temporary. In fact, one inter-
pretation ofthe results is that older adults’ positivity effects
reflect repression or denial that might impair health in the
long run. However, research with people grieving the death
of a spouse suggests that experiencing positive affect even in
response to negative events is beneficial rather than
harmful [46]. Bereaved spouses who experience some posi-
tive emotions while grieving immediately after the death are
more likely to thrive in the following years than those who
show more pronounced distress.
In summary, older adults show positivity biases in
memory that manifest themselves in a variety of ways,
including selectively remembering a higher proportion of
positive stimuli and a lower proportion of negative stimuli
than younger adults do [20,32,33], attributing remem-
bered choice features to options in ways that should satisfy
emotional goals [31], and reconstructing autobiographical
memories so they seem more positive than they actually
were [39,42]. These biases help improve the moods of older
people [42,45] and can also be induced in younger adults
by reminding them to focus on their emotions [31,42].In
the next section, we argue that cognitive control processes
help create these positivity effects.
Effective emotion regulation requires cognitive control
As reviewed in the section on attention, older adults are
more likely than younger adults to ignore negative
information [19,20,24]. Goal-directed selective attention
requires control processes, as do other types of emotion
regulation strategies, such as situation selection, situation
modification, attentional deployment, reappraisal, and
response modulation [47]. Research with younger adults
suggests that the anterior cingulate, medial prefrontal
cortex and orbital/ventromedial frontal cortex play
important roles in implementing these emotional control
processes [48–50].
Although cognitive control declines with age [4,5], there
are significant individual differences in the degree of
decline [51]. This leads to the counterintuitive prediction
that those older adults who show the most effects of age in
terms of cognitive control should show the least effects of
age in the valence of what they attend to and remember.
Even if they are more focused on emotional goals than
younger adults, the low-cognitive-control older adults will
have difficulty implementing them. This hypothesis could
help to explain why older adults who have sustained
strokes or microvascular lesions in frontal brain regions
and have impaired executive processes are prone to
latelife onset of depression [52,53] that is not responsive
to antidepressant medications [54–56].
In addition, older adults who perform poorly on tests of
cognitive control are less likely than those who perform
well to show positivity effects in memory (Mather and
Knight, unpublished). Dividing attention during a picture
slide show does not affect the valence of younger adults’
later recall, but eliminates the positivity effect for older
adults (Mather and Knight, unpublished), consistent with
our hypothesis that emotional goals have higher priority
and are more likely to be allocated cognitive resources
among older adults than younger adults. These links
between cognitive abilities and emotion regulation
suggest that older adults who show the fewest signs of
cognitive decline are the ones who will be most likely to
show positivity effects that help regulate emotion.
The amygdala and aging
The amygdala is a region of the brain that responds to
emotionally arousing information (especially negative,
threatening information) and helps enhance the consoli-
dation of memory for such information [57–60]. Thus, it is
possible that age-related declines in the amygdala might
account for some of the age differences in emotional
attention and memory.
However, current evidence suggests that older adults’
preferential ignoring and forgetting of negative stimuli is
not the result of amygdala decline. Findings that, com-
pared with younger adults, older adults show as much of
an advantage in detecting and orienting to threatening
information [22,24], and as much of a benefit in memory
for arousing relative to non-arousing stimuli [32,36–38],
suggest they have relatively well-maintained amygdala
function (see Table 1). Neuroanatomical studies are
mostly consistent with this possibility, as, compared with
other brain regions, the volume of the amygdala shows
relatively little decline in normal aging [14,61,62].
Instead of overall decline in the amygdala, there might
be changes in what stimuli it is most likely to respond to
with increasing age. Older adults show as much of an
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increase in amygdala activation when viewing positive
pictures as younger adults do, but significantly less of an
increase when viewing negative pictures [63]. While view-
ing negative faces, they show less amygdala activation but
more anterior cingulate activation than younger adults
[64,65]. Recent research with younger adults indicates
that amygdala activation can be downregulated by
emotional control processes implemented by other brain
regions, especially the anterior cingulate, medial pre-
frontal cortex and orbital/ventromedial frontal cortex [49].
Thus, older adults might be using top-down control
processes supported by prefrontal brain regions such as
the anterior cingulate to downregulate amygdala responses
to negative information.
Conclusion
Because of their power to affect mood, memories have a
utility that goes beyond the information they convey
(see, for example, [66]). Recent research suggests that
older adults are motivated by their focus on emotional
goals to encode information and subsequently remember it
in ways that enhance their well-being. Furthermore, those
older adults who are best able to engage cognitive control
mechanisms are most likely to be successful at remember-
ing information in emotionally gratifying ways. The body
of research we have reviewed suggests that motivation –
in particular motivation to regulate emotion states – plays
an important role in cognitive aging. In particular, these
findings highlight the importance of considering the
dynamic interplay among biological and motivational
changes in older adults’ everyday attention and memory
(see also Box 2).
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Box 2. Questions for future research
†There are many types of cognitive control of emotion, ranging from
selective attention to reappraisal [50]. There is evidence that older
adults engage in selective attention to emotional stimuli [19,20,24] as
well as in selection strategies socially [70]. But how likely are they to
engage in other types of emotion control? Are older adults also more
likely than younger adults to regulate emotions through reappraisal
or suppression or are these strategies less effective in the old?
†Further work is needed to understand the interplay of biological
and motivational factors in older adults’ positivity effects. We have
argued that it is the older adults with high-functioning cognitive
control abilities (which is correlated with little prefrontal decline)
who should be most likely to show positivity effects. But are there
changes in the brain that contribute to the age differences in
emotional attention and memory or would younger adults with
limited time horizons show the same effects? There is some initial
evidence that changes in time perspective can make younger adults
emotional memories more like those of older adults [71].
†Does the greater focus on emotion regulation in older adults also
affect their decision making [72]? For example, does their greater
allocation of attention to positive features of choice options [20]
mean they weight these features more heavily in making choices
than younger adults do? If positivity effects are observed during the
decision process, are they associated with poor quality decisions
because negative material receives less attention [73], or could a
positive framing of options result in better decision quality?
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