Date and Time
May 17, 2006
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
Elaine Robertson - Graduate Student in Psychology at Stanford; Seed Grantee for the Center on Advancing Decision Making in Aging (CADMA)

Effective emotion regulation, in part, permits individuals to attend to stimuli that are relevant to a particular situation at hand and to ignore distracting information that can elicit conflicting or maladaptive emotions. Socioemotional Selectivity Theory posits that, despite ubiquitous cognitive decline, older adults place a higher priority on regulating their emotional states than do younger adults.

To examine selective attention and emotion regulation across the lifespan, whole-brain fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) data were collected from 12 older and 12 younger adults as they completed two versions (cognitive and emotional) of an Eriksen flanker task. In the cognitive task, participants judged whether a central target word was a metal or fruit while trying to ignore flanking stimuli either of the other category (Incongruent) or of "XXXX" (Neutral). In the emotional task, participants judged whether a central target word was negative or positive while trying to ignore flanking stimuli either of the opposite valence (Incongruent) or of "XXXX" (Neutral).

As indexed by response times, older adults showed significantly greater interference than did younger adults for Incongruent than for Neutral trials on the cognitive task (reflecting cognitive decline), but showed no interference for valence judgments in the emotional task (reflecting effective emotion regulation). Younger adults showed comparable levels of interference on both tasks.

Analyses of brain activation for Incongruent > Neutral trials for both tasks showed differential patterns of activation for younger and older adults in cingulate regions and in prefrontal cortex. Implications of these results for understanding emotion regulation in older adults will be discussed.

This research is a seed project for the Center on Advancing Decision Making in Aging (CADMA) at Stanford.