ArticleNeurobiology of aging2021
Positivity effect in aging: evidence for the primacy of positive responses to emotional ambiguity.
Article in Neurobiology of aging, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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
24 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The role of trait reappraisal in response to emotional ambiguity: A systematic review and meta-analysis.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2024Pooled it
- Effects of chronic intranasal oxytocin on visual attention to faces vs. natural scenes in older adults.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2024Trial
- BOLD fMRI activations and LC contrast associated with successful episodic memory in healthy older adults and MCI.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Article
- About time? The role of time perspective in the priority for positive over negative emotion in attention.Cognition & emotion · 2026Article
- Age differences in what-if thinking from midlife onwards: Prefrontal contribution and implications for emotional health in late life.GeroScience · 2026Article
- Emotion Formation in Old Age-The Result of a Top-Down Positive Strategy, General Habituation or a Bottom-Up Decreased Interoception?Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Valence bias arises from both positive and negative responses to ambiguous stimuli.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Multimodal anti fraud education improves cognitive emotional and behavioral engagement in older adults.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Chronic Stress May Amplify Gender/Sex Differences in Amygdala Reactivity to Ambiguous Emotional Stimuli.Stress and health : journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress · 2025Article
- A technology-based randomized controlled trial of self-affirmation and gain-framed health messaging to reduce sedentary behavior in older adults.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Perceived Stress, Resilience and Emotional Intelligence in Romanian Healthcare Professionals.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Relevance of pre-stimulus oscillatory activity for the perceived valence of emotional facial expressions.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Proposing a model whereby negative valence bias increases the risk for more severe dysphoric posttraumatic stress disorder and depression symptomology.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2024Article
- More organized white matter is associated with positivity bias in older adults.Brain imaging and behavior · 2024Article
- Detecting implicit and explicit facial emotions at different ages.European journal of ageing · 2024Article
- The effect of age and resilience on the dose-response function between the number of adversity factors and subjective well-being.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Resting-state functional network segregation of the default mode network predicts valence bias across the lifespan.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Specialized late cingulo-opercular network activation elucidates the mechanisms underlying decisions about ambiguity.NeuroImage · 2023Article
- Age-related reduction in trait anxiety: Behavioral and neural evidence of automaticity in negative facial emotion processing.NeuroImage · 2023Article
- The need to change: Is there a critical role of midlife adaptation in mental health later in life?eLife · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Older compared to younger adults show greater amygdala activity to positive emotions, and are more likely to interpret emotionally ambiguous stimuli (e.g., surprised faces) as positive. While some evidence suggests this positivity effect results from a top-down, effortful mechanism, others suggest it may emerge as the default or initial response. The amygdala is a key node in rapid, bottom-up processing and patterns of amygdala activity over time (e.g., habituation) can shed light on the mechanisms underlying the positivity effect. Younger and older adults passively viewed neutral and surprised faces in an MRI. Only in older adults, amygdala habituation was associated with the tendency to interpret surprised faces as positive or negative (valence bias), where a more positive bias was associated with greater habituation. Interestingly, although a positive bias in younger adults was associated with slower responses, consistent with an initial negativity hypothesis in younger adults, older adults showed faster categorizations of positivity. Together, we propose that there may be a switch to a primacy of positivity in aging.
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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.