期刊名称：Revue de Neuropsychologie Neurosciences Cognitives et Cliniques
印刷版ISSN：2101-6739
电子版ISSN：2102-6025
出版年度：2009
卷号：1
期号：3
页码：247-253
DOI：10.1684/nrp.2009.0039
出版社：John Libbey Eurotext
摘要：Authors Cécile Guillaume , Francis Eustache , Béatrice Desgranges Inserm-EPHE-Université de Caen/Basse-Normandie, Unité de Recherche U923, GIP Cyceron, Caen Key words: aging, emotions, cognition, memory DOI : 10.1684/nrp.2009.0039 Page(s) : 247-53 Published in: 2009 A growing body of research has documented developmental shifts in the cognitive processing of emotions. Young adults have a tendency to process negative information more thoroughly than positive information. Although this runs counter to the idea most widely held, these studies revealed that older adults place greater emphasis and process more thoroughly on positive emotions: this phenomenon is known as positivity effect. These age-related effects have some incidence on cognitive functionning, especially on attentional resources and on memory performance. On the one hand, negative stimuli keep their prevalence on automatic attention processes whatever the age, and on the other hand, selective attention is preferentially directed toward positive stimuli in aging. Moreover, despite the age-related deficit in episodic memory tasks, some studies have shown that older adults maintain their performance for positive stimuli only. Positive autobiographical memories of older adults are also more long-lasting and fade less quickly. Results regarding positivity effect are nonetheless more mixed with episodic anterograde memory tasks than with autobiographical memory tasks: this suggests distinct modes of actions. Recent studies have revealed that most robust effects are observed for people with a high level of executive function, and with full attention being allotted to the stimuli, suggesting that this emotional self-regulation is not dependent upon automatic processes; moreover, this positivity effect acts mostly on controlled processes rather than on automatic processes (e.g. dissociation between automatic and controlled attentional processes) and cannot be restricted to a mood congruency effect. Roots of positivity effect are still debated but this field of research is particularly innovative and interesting since it allows considering age-related changes as a beneficial effect and not only as a decline compared to younger adults’ cognitive functioning.
