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

描述（由申请人提供）：情绪过程似乎一般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's（例如，1992年）社会情绪选择理论（SST）是一个帐户的这种影响，享有广泛的实证支持。然而，一些研究发现，当目标对象是情感（特别是威胁或恐惧）刺激时，老年人在感知速度（Mather & Knight，出版中）或注意力捕获（Larsen & Beaudreau，2005）方面与年轻人没有区别。为什么老年人在对情绪刺激的反应上与年轻人不同，而在对这些刺激的感知处理或注意力上却没有差异？在这个应用程序中，我们提出的答案在于应用情感的双过程模型的情绪变化的寿命问题。根据这一模型，一个情绪过程涉及相对快速，早期阶段，前注意和自动处理的情绪意义的刺激。第二个过程涉及一个更受控制的，努力的或执行功能的后期评估的个人意义的刺激。我们假设，早期阶段的过程-自动组成部分-随着年龄的增长保持不变，并保存到晚年，甚至可能抵抗阿尔茨海默病的冲击。然而，更受控制的后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，年长的受试者与年轻的受试者一样记录和最初处理情感信息，但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Stroop任务，前注意点探测任务，附带学习任务，和经典条件反射的负面刺激），以检查老年人是否表现出类似的负面影响偏见，经常发现与年轻人。研究的第二条线将采用加工分离程序（Alberby，1991）来分离情绪（评价性反应）任务中的自动加工和控制加工。在这里，我们建议，老年人将表现出相同的自动偏见的组成部分，发现与年轻的成年人，但会有所不同，他们的评价反应的控制部分。一项为期2年的纵向研究，也提出了检查自动成分的情绪在早期阿尔茨海默氏症患者的痛苦。我们预测，即使在认知能力下降的情况下，阿尔茨海默氏症患者的情绪反应的自动成分仍将保留。这些研究可以解决情绪和衰老文献中的一个主要矛盾，并使人们更深入地了解哪些情绪过程会随着正常衰老和阿尔茨海默病而改变。

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.