optimistic octogenarians

a brand-new study takes on two popular cultural archetypes, those of the forgetful senior and the “grumpy old man.” it indicates not only that seniors are more interested in positive than negative materials, more so than their younger counterparts, but that they have little to no deficiency in working memory when attending to positive emotional material.

the study, in part, tested working memory, the “scratch pad” of the brain. although it remained true that seniors preformed worse on many memory tasks, there was no significant deficit when processing positive emotional tasks.

perhaps the most interesting element of the study is that the results were inverted for younger participants, who were shown to have better working memories with negative emotional stimuli. younger adults have, in the past, been found to process negative information more thoroughly and weigh it more in decision-making. this makes sense evolutionarily, because neglecting negative information has greater risk to survival. of course, it’s difficult to separate between age and cohort effects in studies like these. it could just be that older generations were more optimistic than younger ones, so longitudinal studies would be necessary.

researchers propose socioemotional selectivity theory as the explanation for this phenomenon. in this theory, goals are ensconced in temporal contexts wherein youth focus on preparing for the future. individuals with restrictions on their time, such as older people and patients with terminal illness, focus on emotionally meaningful objects and events.

carstensen, l.l., and mikels, j.a. at the intersection of emotion and cognition. current directions in psychological science vol. 14 no. 3

Labels: well being