The Age-Related Positivity Effect in a Neutral Stimuli Only Paradigm

• Main Authors: Chi-Ying Liu, 劉淇瑛
• Other Authors: Ching-Fan Sheu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/03550300547405477106

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 認知科學研究所 === 97 === As we grow older, do we continue to perceive the same object or react to the same situation in the same manner? Consider the proverbial question: "Is the glass half empty or half full?” Do young people tend to see it as half empty, while old people see it as half full? This thesis investigates whether older and younger adults take the same point of view when confronted with such a question. The observation that people tend to become more motivated to react in a more positive way toward events as they become older is called the age-related positivity effect. Previous studies demonstrating this effect mostly employed paradigms in which stimulus valence was determined by the experimenters instead of by the subjects. Moreover, subjects were often explicitly told to judge stimuli by their emotional valence. This could create an experimenter demand effect as subjects could guess at the purpose of the experiment. In this thesis, I conducted experiments using Chinese words (regular words and antonyms) with neutral affective connotations--this is a neutral stimuli only paradigm--and made use of approach and avoidance in the automatic evaluation paradigm to validate results obtained from rating responses. A word association experiment was also conducted to examine age differences in affective association. Findings of this thesis work provide further empirical evidence supporting the theory of socioemotional selectivity in its account of the age-related positivity effect. In comparison with younger adults, older adults were more likely to regard neutral words as positive, bring them closer instead of pushing them further away, and produce positive affective association. The implication is that we orient toward looking on the bright side of things as we age.