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

描述(由申请人提供)：情绪过程似乎普遍随着年龄的增长而下降，特别是对负面事件和刺激的反应。卡斯滕森(例如，1992年)的社会情绪选择性理论(SST)是对这一效应的解释，得到了广泛的经验支持。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，老年人在知觉速度(Mather&Knight，Press)或注意力捕获(Larsen&Beaudreau，2005)的测量上与年轻人没有区别。老年人和年轻人在对情绪刺激的反应上有什么不同，但在对这些刺激的感知处理或注意力上却没有不同？在这一应用中，我们提出答案在于将情绪的双过程模型应用于关于情绪变化的终生问题。根据这一模型，一个情绪过程涉及对刺激情绪意义的相对快速、早期、预先注意和自动处理。第二个过程涉及对刺激的个人意义进行更可控、更努力或更具执行功能的后期评估。我们假设，早期阶段的过程--自动成分--随着年龄的增长保持完好，并在以后的生活中得到很好的保存，甚至可能抵抗阿尔茨海默病的袭击。然而，更受控制的后期过程是最有可能出现年龄差异的地方。事实上，卡斯滕森的SST可能主要适用于情绪反应中更受控制的后期方面。换句话说，年长的受试者注册和最初处理情绪信息的方式与年轻人相同，但随后他们在如何调节初始反应方面有所不同。为了检验这些假说，本文提出了三条研究路线。一系列研究将使用评估情绪刺激早期加工的实验室任务(例如，情绪启动任务、情绪性Simon和Stroop任务、预先注意的点探测任务、附带学习任务和对负面刺激的经典条件反射)来检查老年人是否表现出与年轻人相似的负面情感偏见。第二个研究将采用过程分离程序(Jacoby，1991)来分离情绪(评价反应)任务中的自动和控制过程。在这里，我们认为老年人将表现出与年轻人相同的自动偏见成分，但在其评估反应的受控成分上有所不同。还建议进行一项为期两年的纵向研究，以检查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，阿尔茨海默氏症患者的情绪反应的自动成分也将保持不变。综上所述，这些研究可以解决情绪和衰老文献中的一个主要不一致之处，并导致对哪些情绪过程会随着正常衰老和阿尔茨海默病改变以及哪些情绪过程不会改变的更深入的理解。

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.