EPCL Departmental Research Seminar 2008/09

On the age-related positivity effect in judgment and preference

Professor Ching-Fan SHEU

Institute of Education at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Taiwan

Chair : Prof. WANG Wen Chung

Abstract

This talk presents a series of studies conducted in our laboratory to investigate the age-related positivity effect in judgment and preference.  The positivity effect refers to the phenomenon that older adults' emotional processing is focused on positive and away from negative stimuli.

The theory of socioemotional selectivity (Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999) posits that limits to life expectancies motivates people to shift priorities such that the pursuit of happiness dominates the pursuit of intellectual satisfaction. The theory has been invoked to account for the age-related positivity effect in attention, memory and decision making.

Three limitations may be identified in research on the positivity effect (1) the age-related bias has not been observed in tasks where only neutral stimuli have been presented, (2) the effect has not been observed using implicit, instead of explicit, evaluations of positive or negative information, (3) few experiments have examined older adults’ decisions by contrasting directly “affective” and “deliberative” modes of choice.

Our studies aim to critically and rigorously test the theory of socioemotional selectivity. The findings contribute to mapping the scope of the theory in explaining older adults' motivated cognition.

SURPPORTING SUMMARY

According to the socioemotional selectivity theory (Mather & Carstensen, 2003), older adults are more likely to look on the bright side of things to maintain a positive mood. In study 1, participants were asked to rate a list of Chinese words (105 were abstract words and 15 were antonymic words) on a 3-point scale (-1 = negative, 0 = neural, 1 = positive). The positivity effect was found for both groups, but older adults rated more positively on most words than younger adults. Younger adults rated antonymic words more negatively. The estimated distance between the cut points used by older and younger adults to judge neutral versus positive was significantly different from 0. The estimated shift for the antonymic word effect of younger adults was also significant from 0. The results provided further support to the theory in a neutral stimuli only paradigm. In study 2, a different sample of participants first rated 6 target words on a 3-point scale. They were then asked to free associate words with the target words and to rate the resulting associative words on the same 3-point scale. Older adults produced fewer and less variable word associations. In contrast, younger adults produced more word associations both in quantity and in heterogeneity of valence. No significant difference was observed between older and younger adults with respect to the strength of agreement between targets and associative words. Though consistent with current findings on age-associated memory, study 2 provided inconclusive evidence that same-valence targets tend to agree with same-valence words in free association. However, this is an exploratory study using only a small sample of words. Future research will extend the neutral stimuli only paradigm to examine the age-related positivity effect in automatic evaluation of Chinese words.

Professor Ching-Fan Sheu is currently a faculty member of the Institute of Education at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Taiwan. Dr. Sheu received his doctoral degree in Experimental Psychology from New York University in 1989. Prior to his current position, he was affiliated with the Psychology Department of National Chung Cheng University (2005-2006) and the Institute of Cognitive Science of National Cheng Kung University (2006~2008). Before returning to Taiwan, he was a tenured associate professor at the Psychology Department of DePaul University, Chicago. Dr. Sheu has also been a visiting scholar at the Academia Sinica, the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, and at the Centre Europeen des Sciences du Gout. Dijon, France.

Dr, Sheu’s major research areas are psychophysics, mathematical psychology, judgment and decision making, and applications of computers in behavioral sciences. He currently teaches a seminar course in emotion and cognition and a course on statistical computing at the Institute of Education of NCKU. He has published widely in psychology and in rehabilitation medicine. He is currently an associate editor of the Chinese Journal of Psychology and has served as ad hoc reviewer to several prestigious journals including "Memory and Cognition", "Journal of Experimental Psychology", "Journal of Mathematical Psychology", "Journal of Developmental Psychobiology" and "Behavior Research Methods". Dr. Sheu is the recipient of several competitive research grants and consultancy projects tendered by governments in Taiwan, France, Australia and the United States.

26 September 08 (Fri)

12:30 – 1:30 pm

D2 - LP – 08

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