Emotional Aging: Preservation of Function in the Elderly and Alzheimer's Patients

描述（由申请人提供）：情绪过程通常随着年龄的增长而下降，特别是对负面事件和刺激的反应。Carstensen （e.g., 1992）的社会情绪选择理论（SST）是对这种效应的解释，得到了广泛的实证支持。然而，一些研究发现，当目标对象是情感刺激（特别是威胁或恐惧）时，老年人在感知速度（Mather & Knight, in press）或注意力捕获（Larsen & Beaudreau, 2005）的测量上与年轻人没有什么不同。为什么老年人对情绪刺激的反应不同于年轻人，而对这些刺激的知觉处理或注意却没有差异？在这个应用中，我们提出答案在于将情感的双过程模型应用于有关情绪变化的终身问题。根据这个模型，一个情绪过程涉及对刺激的情绪意义的相对快速的、早期的、前注意的和自动的处理。第二个过程涉及对刺激的个人意义的后期评估，这是一个更受控制的、更努力的或执行功能。我们假设，早期阶段的过程——自动成分——随着年龄的增长而保持完整，并在以后的生活中保存得很好，甚至可能抵抗阿尔茨海默病的侵袭。然而，更受控制的晚期过程是最有可能发现年龄差异的地方。事实上，Carstensen的SST可能主要适用于情绪反应的更受控制的后期方面。换句话说，年龄较大的受试者与年轻人一样，登记和最初处理情绪信息，但随后他们在如何调节最初的反应方面有所不同。提出了三条调查路线来检验这些假设。一系列研究将使用实验室任务来评估情绪刺激的早期处理（例如，情绪启动任务，情感西蒙和斯特鲁普任务，注意前点探测任务，附带学习任务，以及对消极刺激的经典条件反射），以检查老年人是否表现出与年轻人相似的消极影响偏见。第二条研究路线将采用过程分离程序（Jacoby, 1991）来分离情绪（评价性反应）任务中的自动过程和受控过程。在这里，我们提出老年人会表现出与年轻人相同的自动偏见成分，但他们的评价反应的控制成分会有所不同。我们还提出了一项为期2年的纵向研究，以检测早期阿尔茨海默病患者的情绪自动成分。我们预测，即使在认知能力下降的情况下，阿尔茨海默病患者的情绪反应的自动成分仍将保留下来。综上所述，这些研究可以解决情绪和衰老文献中一个主要的不一致之处，并导致对情绪过程在正常衰老和阿尔茨海默病中发生或不发生变化的更深层次的理解。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Emotional processes appear to generally decline with age, particularly responsiveness to negative events and stimuli. Carstensen's (e.g., 1992) socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) is an account of this effect that enjoys wide empirical support. However, some studies find that older adults do not differ from the young on measures of perceptual speed (Mather & Knight, in press) or attentional capture (Larsen & Beaudreau, 2005) when the target objects are affective (particularly threat or fear) stimuli. How can older adults differ from younger in their responsiveness to emotional stimuli, yet not differ in their perceptual processing of, or attention to, those stimuli? In this application we propose the answer lies in applying a dual-process model of emotion to life-span questions about emotional change. According to this model, one emotion process involves relatively fast, early-stage, pre-attentive and automatic processing of the emotional significance of a stimulus. A second process involves a more controlled, effortful or executive function later-stage evaluation of personal meaning of that stimulus. We hypothesize that the early stage process - the automatic component - remains intact with age and is preserved well into later life and may even be resistant to the onslaught of Alzheimer's disease. The more controlled late-stage process, however, is where age differences are most likely to be found. Indeed, Carstensen's SST may apply mainly to the more controlled, later-stage aspects of emotional responding. In other words, older subjects register and initially process emotional information the same as younger, but then they differ in terms of how they regulate that initial responsiveness. Three lines of investigation are proposed to test these hypotheses. One series of studies will use laboratory tasks that assess early-stage processing of emotional stimuli (e.g., emotion priming tasks, affective Simon and Stroop tasks, pre-attentive dot probe tasks, incidental learning task, and classical conditioning to negative stimuli) to examine whether older adults demonstrate similar negative affect biases routinely found with younger adults. The second line of investigation will employ the process dissociation procedure (Jacoby, 1991) to separate automatic and controlled processes in emotional (evaluative responding) tasks. Here we propose that older adults will exhibit the same automatic bias component found with younger adults, but will differ in the controlled component of their evaluative responses. A 2-year longitudinal study is also proposed to exam the automatic component of emotion in patients suffering from early-stage Alzheimer's disease. We predict that, even in the face of cognitive decline, the automatic component of emotional responding will remain preserved in Alzheimer's patients. Taken together these studies can resolve a major inconsistency in the emotion and aging literature and lead to a deeper understanding of which emotional processes do and do not change with normal aging and with Alzheimer's disease.