Kimberly Castillo
Odessa College
7 March 2017
Abstract: I chose the article aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory. Older adults show more emotionally gratifying memory distortion for past choices and autobiographical information than younger adults do. Positive items account for a larger proportion of older adults ‘subsequent memories than those of younger adult. These findings suggest that motivation and cognitive abilities contribute to older adults’ improved emotion regulation.
Psychological (Study) Analysis The modern perspective this research falls under is cognitive. Cognitive is believed that your behavior is determined by your …show more content…
This suggests that older adults are able to vanish negative affect more effectively than younger adults. We fully attend to only a small portion of understanding our surroundings and often fail to process information that is not consistent with current goals. “A study supporting this possibility used a dot- probe task. This is where one emotional and one neutral face appeared next to each other on a computer screen for one second. When the faces disappeared, a dot appeared behind one of the faces. The data showed that adults were slower to indicate which side dots were on when they appeared behind neutral faces, and quicker when they appeared behind positive faces than neutral faces. On another study, the young and old adults were given a chart with information about several models of cars and were asked which car they would choose. Older adults spent a longer time reviewing the positive features and a shorter time reviewing the negative features than younger adults do. In the next research, groups of younger and older adults were asked to make a series of hypothetical choices, each between two options that had some positive and some negative features. In another study, another group that rated their current emotions every so …show more content…
But how likely are they to engage in other types of emotional control? Are older adults more likely to regulate emotions through reappraisal or suppression than the younger adults or are these strategies less effective in the old.” (Mather 2017)
Follow- up experiment: Further work is needed to understand the interplay of biological and motivational factors in older adults’ positivity effects. There have been arguments that it is the older adults with high- functioning cognitive control abilities that should be most likely to show positivity effects. Nevertheless, are these changes in the brain that contribute to the age differences in emotional attention and memory or would younger adults with limited time horizons show the same effects?
Proposed Method:
My participants will be young adults. It is said that lack of sleep can affect individuals’ memory. If that is so, I can go into a deeper research. I can have half of the young adults have enough sleep and the other half will lack of sleep. Before they go to bed, they will be shown a grocery list with only five products. These products will be butter, milk, cereal, chips, and bananas. We will then ask both groups if they can recall the items from the grocery