ArticleCerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)2020
Preparing for the Worst: Evidence that Older Adults Proactively Downregulate Negative Affect.
Article in Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 13 citations in OpenAlex.
- Age differences in what-if thinking from midlife onwards: Prefrontal contribution and implications for emotional health in late life.GeroScience · 2026Article
- Impacts of early life adversity on the neurocircuitry of emotional memory in children.Development and psychopathology · 2025Article
- The 'discontinuity hypothesis' of depression in later life-clinical and research implications.Age and ageing · 2023Review
- Age-related reductions in arousal-enhanced memory are moderated by trait emotion regulation.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The need to change: Is there a critical role of midlife adaptation in mental health later in life?eLife · 2023Review
- Effect and mechanisms of exercise for complex regional pain syndrome.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2023Review
- Depressive symptoms are associated with reduced positivity preferences in episodic memory in aging.Neurobiology of aging · 2023Article
- Age-related changes in repetition suppression of neural activity during emotional future simulation.Neurobiology of aging · 2020Article
- Functional Interplay Between Posterior Parietal Cortex and Hippocampus During Detection of Memory Targets and Non-targets.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Previous studies have only investigated age-related differences in emotional processing and encoding in response to, not in anticipation of, emotional stimuli. In the current study, we investigated age-related differences in the impact of emotional anticipation on affective responses and episodic memory for emotional images. Young and older adults were scanned while encoding negative and neutral images preceded by cues that were either valid or invalid predictors of image valence. Participants were asked to rate the emotional intensity of the images and to complete a recognition task. Using multivariate behavioral partial least squares (PLS) analysis, we found that greater anticipatory recruitment of the amygdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), and hippocampus in older adults predicted reduced memory for negative than neutral images and the opposite for young adults. Seed PLS analysis further showed that following negative cues older adults, but not young adults, exhibited greater activation of vmPFC, reduced activation of amygdala, and worse memory for negative compared with neutral images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to provide evidence that the "positivity effect" seen in older adults' memory performance may be related to the spontaneous emotional suppression of negative affect in anticipation of, not just in response to, negative stimuli.
Indexed as
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.