The Influence of Age-Related Positivity Bias Effect in Emotional Language Comprehension

Abstract

Older adults usually prioritize positive information over negative ones, termed as “positivity bias”. For instance, when older and younger adults are given information about several models of a car, and are asked to choose a car, older adults tend to spend more time on positive than negative features, compared with younger adults. This age-related positivity bias could in turn influence readers’ contextualized language use. However, it is unclear whether older adults still process and evaluate affective features of a word in isolation and in contexts the same way as younger adults do. In this dissertation, I examined whether and how the age-related positivity bias influences language processing from the three perspectives: visual word recognition, semantic/meaning update, and lexical prediction. Chapter 1 introduces the topic and provides a framework for understanding the relevant theories on the age-related positivity bias. Chapter 2 shows that at the single word level, older adults usually attend to low-arousing positive words first, and then regulate low-arousing negative meanings later. Chapter 3 shows that at the sentence level, older adults tend to update the affective-neural representations of a word with both positive and negative contexts. Chapter 4 shows that before an emotional word occurs, older adults predict both positive and negative meanings/features of a word equally likely. Finally, Chapter 5 presents a general conclusion for the dissertation as well as possible future directions.