ArticlePsychology and aging2025
Negative images, regardless of task relevance, distract younger more than older adults.
Article in Psychology and aging, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Prefrontal hemodynamic alterations during resting state and stroop interference in cognitively healthy older adults with high plasma pTau-217 levels.Neuroimage. Reports · 2026Article
- Age differences in proactive and reactive control: valence asymmetries in the processing of complex emotional scenes.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- About time? The role of time perspective in the priority for positive over negative emotion in attention.Cognition & emotion · 2026Article
- Age differences in rapid attention to emotional stimuli are driven more by valence than by discrete emotions.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Sleep dependent autonomic correlates of affect and arousal in younger and older adults.Sleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society · 2026Article
- Age-Related Positivity Bias in Emotion Recognition Is Linked to Lower Cognitive Performance and Altered Amygdala-Orbitofrontal Connectivity.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- The mediating role of sleep in PTSD and positive/negative emotional states during the COVID-19 resurgence.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Negative images, regardless of task relevance, distract younger more than older adults.Psychology and aging · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Older adults, compared to younger adults, tend to prioritize positive information more and negative information less. We recently observed this "positivity effect" pattern in an emotion-induced blindness task, which measures attention allocated to task-irrelevant emotional stimuli in the way participants are distracted by them. Older adults were less distracted by negative images compared to younger adults. This could represent an age-related priority shift away from negative emotions. However, it could also be that older adults simply do not see negative images presented at a fast rate. A similar possibility is that older adults to fail to engage with negative stimuli because of their complex nature, rather than due to age-related changes in emotional preference per se. In the present study, we tested this possibility by manipulating the required degree of engagement with emotional distractors. Participants completed a modified emotion-induced blindness task, with emotional distractors that were either task irrelevant (younger:
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