title: Avoiding threat in late adulthood: testing two life span theories of emotion.
abstract: The purpose of the present research was to explore the time course of age-related attentional biases and the role of emotion regulation as a potential mediator of older adults' performance in an emotion dot probe task. In two studies, younger and older adults (N = 80) completed a visual probe detection task, which presented happy, angry, and sad facial expressions. Across both studies, age influenced attentional responses to angry faces. Results indicated a bias away from angry-related facial emotion information occurring relatively late in attention. Age effects were not attributable to decreasing information processing speed or visuoperceptual function. Current results demonstrated that an age-related attentional preference away from angry facial cues was mediated by efforts to suppress emotion. Findings are discussed in relation to current theories of sociocognitive aging.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mental Health Sciences, University College London, United Kingdom. v.orgeta@ucl.ac.uk
authors.forename: Vasiliki
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Orgeta
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention; D003071:Cognition; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D008960:Models, Psychological; D055815:Young Adult