The Lifespan Development Of Positivity Effects In Cognition

Along with the developing of the society and researches deep in aging, more and more people pay close attention to the nature of aging. The research results show that when people get older, their performance do not simply get worse and worse. Aging is proved to be a complicated process. For example, there is pervasive decline in cognitive abilities when people get older, but the research results will be different because of the different materials. Also, the developing trends of emotion in old age vary with different categories.Psychology is divided into different processes, but these processes are not really unattached, therefore, the interaction of the cognition and emotion becomes the hotspot of aging. This research is supposed to explore how emotion plays a role in cognition. We have designed three experiments; the dot-probe task in attention; the reorganization for visual emotional pictures and additional words. By comparing the cognition results of the old age group and young people, exploring the developing trends in old age, we found that older adults showed preferential looking toward happy faces and away from sad faces and the tend to memorize positive emotional faces and words. Thus, we argue that there is such Positivity Effect in old stage. Furthermore, the results of this research show that the Positivity Effect in attention and visual memory reach its peak at the middle-old age, but the bias for positive emotional words reach its peak at the young-old stage.