RESEARCH PROJECTS.
Positivity Effect: emotional bias in aging
Positivity effect is the tendency older adults have to pay attention and remember more positive information. This process is believed to be associated with improvement of emotion abilities in aging, contrary to the natural cognitive decline present in this population. However, positivity effect is yet not fully understood, with a few contradictory findings and a discussion whether it is a controlled cognitive process or a byproduct of aging neural decline.
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Evidence associates aging with decrease of brain functions, therefore, decline of cognitive abilities, such as attention and memory are not a surprise. However, there is an increasing line of study investigating emotional processing and its tendency to improve with age. This leads to a phenomenon called Positivity Effect (PE), a characteristic in aging where a bias towards positive information related to attention and memory is
present. This effect is reported among older adults, commonly above 60 years old, compared to younger adults.
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Our research tries to investigate this phenomenon in Hungarian population, discussing the different theories behind it and its relation with cognitive abilities.
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Do you want to help us to participate in this study? If you are above 18 years old, you can participate, just click on this link: https://www.psytoolkit.org/c/3.4.2/survey?s=dyppu and do this task and fill out our survey. You will help us tremendously. But please note, you will need a computer as the task needs a real keyboard to be completed! Thank you very much in advance.
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