Older adults' attentional deployment : differential gaze patterns for different negative mood states

Background and objectives: Older adults are characterized by an attentional preference for positive over negative information. Since this positivity effect is considered to be an emotion regulation strategy, it should be more pronounced when emotion regulation is needed. In contrast to previous studies that focused on the effects of sad mood on attention, we used a stressor to activate emotion regulation and evaluate the effects of different types of mood state changes. Moreover, we evaluated mood effects on attentional processes using a paradigm that allows disentangling between different attentional engagement and disengagement processes. Methods: Sixty older adults were randomly assigned to receive a stressor or a control task. Before and after this manipulation, mood state levels (happy, sad, nervous, calm) were assessed. Next, attentional processing of happy, sad, and angry faces was investigated using an eye-tracking paradigm in which participants had to either engage their attention towards or disengage their attention away from emotional stimuli. Results: Changes in different mood state levels were associated with different attentional disengagement strategies. As expected, older adults who increased in sad mood level showed a larger positivity effect as evidenced by a longer time to disengage attention from happy faces. However, older adults who received the tension induction and who decreased in calm mood level were characterized by longer times to disengage attention from sad faces. Limitations: The stressor was only partially effective as it led to changes in calm mood, but not in nervous mood. Conclusions: These results suggest that older adults may deploy a positivity effect in attention (i.e., longer times to disengage from positive information) in order to regulate sad mood, but that this effect may be hampered during the confrontation with stressors. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

The effect of future time perspective manipulation on affect and attentional bias

Socioemotional selectivity theory proposes that decreased future time perspective would lead to an emphasis on goals of well-being, with attentional preference for positive information. We developed a procedure to manipulate future time perspective, based on mental imagery, to experimentally investigate its effects on attention and affect. In experiment 1, we tested a new measure of future time perspective, the scrambled sentence test. In experiment 2, 41 undergraduates were randomly assigned to the imagery procedure with either short-term or long-term future scenarios. Attentional bias was measured by an exogenous cueing task. Between-group differences were found on the scrambled sentence test, indicating that the manipulation induced a different future time perspective in the long-term future imagery group compared to the short-term future imagery group. Although there were no differences in attentional bias at group level, a more expansive future time perspective after the manipulation correlated with more avoidance of negative information. These results indicate that future time perspective is related to information processing, which may point to an affect regulation strategy

The relationship between attentional processing of emotional information and personality : a comparison between older and younger adults

Older adults have been found to focus more on positive and less on negative information compared to younger adults. Yet, results on this attentional positivity effect are inconsistent. Since personality has been related to attentional processing in younger adults, we explored whether (mal) adaptive personality traits are also linked to the occurrence of the positivity effect measured with eye tracking paradigms. We performed two studies with different experimental tasks and recruited for each study 60 community dwelling younger (aged 2450) and 60 older (age 65-91) adults. We found some indication for a positivity effect with a free-viewing task (study 2), but not with a task measuring engagement and disengagement with emotional information (study 1). Although this effect should be interpreted with caution, it corroborates evidence that the positivity effect is more robust in situations without cognitive constraints. No evidence was found for personality traits to be related to the occurrence of the effect. Further research is needed to further clarify conditions that influence older adults' attention for emotional information

Rumination mediates the relationship between impaired cognitive control for emotional information and depressive symptoms: a prospective study in remitted depressed adults

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Autonomic regulation in response to stress : the influence of anticipatory emotion regulation strategies and trait rumination

According to the neurocognitive framework for regulation expectation, adaptively regulating emotions in anticipation of a stressful event should help individuals deal with the stressor itself. The goal of this study was twofold: first, the authors compared the influence of adaptive versus maladaptive anticipatory emotion regulation (ER) on the autonomic system during anticipation of, confrontation with, and recovery from a stressor; second, they explored whether trait rumination moderated this relationship. The authors collected data from 56 healthy female undergraduates during a public speaking task. The task involved 4 phases: baseline, anticipatory ER, stressor, and recovery. Participants were assigned to 1 of 2 anticipatory ER instructions (reappraisal or catastrophizing). Heart rate variability (HRV) indexed autonomic regulation. Results confirmed that HRV was higher in the reappraisal than in the catastrophizing group (over all time points, except for baseline). Trait rumination levels moderated the effect of anticipatory ER strategy on HRV during the stressor phase. Specifically, whereas for low ruminators reappraisal (versus catastrophizing) in the anticipation phase led to higher HRV when confronted to the stressor, high ruminators demonstrated lower HRV in that same condition. To conclude, over all participants, using reappraisal during the anticipation phase allowed participants to better cope with stress. However, only low, but not high ruminators could profit from the beneficial effect of anticipatory reappraisal on autonomic regulation. Even though further research is needed, this study suggests that, in female undergraduates, the tendency to ruminate is associated with abnormal anticipatory ER that might hinder an adaptive response to a stressor