The Time Course of Age-related Emotional Preference in Task-irrelevant Affective Processing*

Studies of the age-related positivity effect have demonstrated that older adults have a generalized preference to positive stimuli or avoidance to negative stimuli compared with younger adults. However, it remains unclear when and how this positive effect occurs in task-irrelevant affective processing in the aging brain. The present study investigated age-related emotional preference in one task-irrelevant affective stimuli processing by event-related brain potentials (ERPs) measurement with a specific focus on the time course of older adults' emotional processing and regulation. Younger and older adults completed a modified oddball task in which the deviant stimuli were affective faces. In the relatively early time window, the brain activities were not modulated by emotional valence in younger adults, yet the sad stimuli elicited a larger P3a than the happy and neutral ones in older adults. In the late time window, the sad stimuli elicited a larger positive slow wave than the happy stimuli in younger adults. Contrarily, at the later processing stage older adults' valence differences were eliminated. In general, we found time course differences in how older adults processed task-irrelevant affective stimuli compared with the young, and an age-related positivity effect occurred in the late time window, manifested as a negativity preference in younger and no preferences in older adults. These results provided evidence for supporting socioemotional selectivity theory from an ERP approach.