The Influence Of Positive Emotional Effect On The Ownership Effect Of The Elderly

People have a cognitive preference for information related to themselves over information related to others.This cognitive preference is called the self-reference effect(SRE).Numerous studies have shown that this self-reference affects cognitive mechanisms such as attention,memory,and perception.In recent years,with the proposed ownership paradigm,people’s exploration of self-reference effect has produced a new change.For example,when individuals regard the objects they own as part of themselves,such sense of ownership will also lead to cognitive preferences consistent with self-reference.This cognitive preference is also called The ownership effect.However,most of the current research on ownership effect focuses on children,college students and some special groups,while few people pay attention to the ownership effect of the elderly.And the elderly in cognition and some other than the self-reference effect,special cognitive preferences,especially in areas such as attention,memory,the study found that,compared with negative emotion information processing,the elderly in positive emotional information processing to perform better,they show the positive effect of emotional information(positivity effect).It is inevitable that some emotional information will be incorporated into the research of self-reference.However,previous studies only discussed the relationship between positive emotional effect and self-reference effect,and rarely took the emotional information of ownership effect into account.So it’s not clear how the ownership effect as a random encoding form of self-reference is related to the positive effect.In Experiment 1,the classical ownership paradigm was used to explore the influence of ownership effect of the elderly on item classification.The results showed that,compared with the recognition of other people’s possessions,the elderly had a better recognition of their own possessions,that is,the elderly also had the self-ownership effect.In Experiment 2,the classical ownership paradigm was used to further explore the relationship between items with emotional valence(positive/negative/neutral)and the self-ownership effect of the elderly.The results showed that the elderly were better at recognizing positive objects than the young under the self-ownership condition.Young people were better at recognizing negative objects than older people,that is,positive effects did affect the ownership effect of older people.In Experiment 3,the classical ownership paradigm was used to explore the relationship between the ownership effect of the elderly and the unfamiliar emotional valence items(positive,negative and neutral).The results showed that the elderly were better at recognizing unfamiliar positive objects than the young under the self-ownership condition.Compared with the elderly,the young were better at recognizing unfamiliar negative items.In other words,the positive effect still played a role in the ownership effect of the elderly under the condition of unfamiliar emotional valence items.In conclusion,this paper draws the following conclusions.Old people and young people also have ownership effect,that is,ownership effect is robust.Especially in the self-ownership condition,positive emotional items can improve the elderly’s memory of their own items.However,familiarity did not affect the positive effect on the ownership effect of the elderly.