Research

Recently Completed & Current Research

Age Differences in Visual Attention to Emotion

In collaboration with Paul Corballis and the Electrophysiology and Psychophysics Lab, we have been examining the role that emotion plays in attentional deployment to facial expressions. Emotional facial expressions communicate information to us from our environment. Past research has shown that college-aged individuals attend more to emotional faces than to neutral faces. In fact, faces carrying negative emotions receive the most attention from younger adults. Research with older adults, on the other hand, does not reproduce this bias favoring negative stimuli. Instead, in our work, older adults tend to suppress their deployment of visual attention to negative faces, as indexed by modulations in early ERP components to visual probes. One possible reason for this could stem from the tendency for older adults to try to minimize the negative emotions that they experience in day-to-day life. Whereas negative facial expressions of emotion may signal threat or danger to younger adults, negative expressions repel older adults who choose not to invest a lot of energy dwelling on the negative emotions of strangers. Future work will examine this phenomenon as it relates to emotional development in adulthood. In collaboration with the Electrophysiology and Psychophysics lab (link to http://psychology.gatech.edu/corballislab/), many techniques (e.g., EEG, fMRI, eye-tracking, skin conductance) will be employed to examine why young and older adults use different attentional deployment strategies when faced with negative emotional stimuli.

Knowledge Activation and Dispositional Judgments

Previous research has demonstrated that older adults are more likely than younger adults to ignore situational information and to make dispositional inferences when explaining others’ behavior. However, older adults’ tendency for higher dispositional attributions decreases when they are given more time to think about the stimulus material. In a set of studies we explored age-differences in dispositional inferences when behavioral and situational information are presented independently of each other. A new video-based paradigm was developed in which a person demonstrating negative social behavior was shown. Afterwards, situational information that could explain the listener’s behavior was introduced. Participants were asked to evaluate the listener’s level of coldness after the video and after the situational information were shown. It was found that younger and older adults evaluated the coldness of the listener similarly after they saw the video. This suggests that the visual behavioral information is processed similarly in older and younger adults resulting in similar judgments. However, when verbally presented situational information was introduced, younger adults changed their judgments more than older adults. We suggest that older adults are less willing to make an extreme judgment when confronted with conflicting information, but rather tend to use the middle scale point. In line of a trait-diagnosticity approach this can be interpreted as older adults’ greater sensitivity towards the trait implications of negative social behavior, namely that the negative social behavior is more informative for the underlying trait of coldness than the extenuating situational information.

The Role of Perspective Taking in Forming Dispositional Attributions

Previous research has demonstrated that older adults are more likely than younger adults to draw dispositional inferences. In this study, hypothetical relationship problems were used. Participants were asked to take one of three perspectives, the male, female, or an adviser’s perspective to investigate whether older and younger adults differ in their dispositional attributions when they are explicitly instructed to take a certain perspective. It is expected that age differences in dispositional inferences will be less pronounced when an objective advice-giver’s perspective is taken. Moreover, it will be explored whether the instruction to focus on one specific character makes dispositional attributions of the other character more likely. Data are currently entered and coded.

Causal Attributions in Everyday Problems 

Previous research on causal attribution in our lab has used fictitious vignettes to investigate age-differences in causal attributions. This study uses a different methodological approach by focusing on causal attributions in every-day problems. Participants were asked to describe personal problems in different domains and asked to indicate whether the persons involved in this problem had any role in causing the problem. First analyses indicate that - unlike in the fictitious problems - older adults tend to blame themselves and others less than younger adults do.

Are there age differences in the ability to detect deceit?

In a recent study, we explored whether young or older adults are better at knowing when someone is lying, and why. The literature has shown that facial expressions of emotion are key cues to deceit (Frank & Ekman, 1997). The aging literature has shown an age-related decline in decoding emotions (e.g., Malatesta, Izard, Culver, & Nicolich, 1987). In this study, we investigated whether age differences in deceit detection are related to impairments in emotion recognition. Young and older adults (N = 364) were presented with 20 interviews (crime or opinion topic) and asked to decide whether each man was lying or telling the truth. There were 3 presentation conditions: 1) visual, 2) audio, or 3) audio-visual. For crime interviews, reduced emotion recognition performance hindered older adults in the visual condition. For opinion topic interviews, older adults exhibited a truth bias.

Individual Differences in Emotional Complexity in Adulthood

There are four conceptualizations of emotional complexity currently in the literature. These conceptualizations vary as a function of number, intensity, and type of emotion(s) experienced. This project sought to examine these four conceptualizations and investigate the following research questions: (1) Does emotional complexity differ across adulthood? (2) How does emotional complexity impact emotion regulation and problem solving strategies?  (3) What individual characteristics account for variations in emotional complexity and emotion regulation strategies? We have currently completed data collection on this project and are in the data analysis stage.

Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies

Research suggests that older adults have improved emotional outcomes and use different emotion regulation strategies (e.g., more distraction and positive reappraisal and less rumination) relative to young adults. One study in the lab is investigating the mood and memory-related effects of these strategies to determine if they may underlie age differences in emotional outcomes. Young and older adults watch a sad movie clip while being instructed to use specific emotion regulation strategies (i.e., distraction from negativity, positive reappraisal, rumination, or no instructions).  We expect older adults to show more mood improvement than young adults in the no  instructions condition. Young adults given positive reappraisal instructions are expected to show mood-related outcomes similar to older adult controls. The results will have implications for the effectiveness of particular emotion regulation strategies and whether age differences in these strategies explain older adults' preserved emotional functioning.

The Role of Personal Goals for the Appraisal of Everyday Problems and the Employment of Problem-Solving Strategies over the Adult Lifespan

Previous research has shown that individuals of different ages interpret and deal with the same problem in systematically different ways. We examined whether developmental changes in personal goals represent one potential mechanism underlying observed age-differences in everyday problem solving. In order to get at different aspects of this phenomenon we used multiple methodologies including qualitative interviews, an experiment, and a time-sampling study. Based on qualitative interviews concerning everyday problems, we first investigated age-related differences in problem solving goals and how they are linked to self- and other-focused problem solving strategies across adulthood. We showed that developmentally relevant goals predicted problem solving strategy use over and above well-known problem domain differences. By considering the match between autonomy goals and self-focused problem solving as well as generative goals and other-focused problem solving, we introduced a new measure of problem solving effectiveness. In a next step, we then employed experimental methods to test the identified goal-strategy relationships by means of manipulating goals for solving everyday problems in young and older adults. This approach confirmed that participants adjust their strategies to their problem solving goals. Currently, we are conducting a time-sampling study with elderly couples in order to examine both individual and dyadic problem solving strategies in response to goal-related obstacles.