title: Friend or foe? Age moderates time-course specific responsiveness to trustworthiness cues.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  There is growing evidence of a greater focus on positive relative to negative information in older adulthood. Up to date, the age-related positivity effect in affective processing has been only investigated with respect to explicit emotional cues. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether similar age-related differences would be observed in reference to subtler cues, such as emotionally suggestive structural facial characteristics.
  
  
  METHODS
  We used a gaze following paradigm and investigated the temporal dynamics of responding to facial trustworthiness cues in younger and older adults.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Both age groups provided similar trustworthiness evaluations. Nonetheless, under responding conditions that allowed for volitional modulatory influences (600 ms), older (but not younger) adults with superior cognitive resources showed more gaze following in response to trustworthy than to untrustworthy looking faces.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This study provided initial evidence that the age-related positivity effect in affective processing extends to subtle emotional cues, generally interpreted as being reflective of socially relevant personality traits. Implications for aging theories of motivated cognition and developmental changes in reliance on superficial affective cues are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Rotman Research Institute, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. raluca.petrican@gmail.com
authors.forename: Raluca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Petrican
authors.forename: Tammy
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: English
authors.forename: James J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Gross
authors.forename: Cheryl
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Grady
authors.forename: Tasmia
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hai
authors.forename: Morris
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Moscovitch
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D001288:Attention; D003463:Cues; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012938:Social Perception; D035502:Trust / Q000523:psychology*; D055815:Young Adult