The relationship between the positivity effect in attention and memory processes of young and elderly adults and its association with cognitive emotion regulation strategies

This research investigates the positivity effect, which expresses the change in attention and memory processes with increasing age; It aims to examine the positivity effect in the light of Socio-Emotional Selectivity Theory (SST) and understand its relationship with cognitive emotion regulation strategies. In the research conducted with the participation of 40 young and 37 older adults residing in Mersin, emotional faces with happy, sad and neutral facial expressions were used as stimuli. Reaction time for different emotional stimuli was measured using a dot-probe task that measures attentional bias. By performing a recall test, the correct recall rates of different emotional stimuli were determined. The findings showed that the reaction times of young and old participants did not differ according to the facial expression in the pictures, and the rate of correct recall of the pictures did not differ according to the facial expression. The positive emotion score of elderly participants is higher than that of young participants, and the negative emotion score of elderly participants is lower than that of young participants. No significant relationship was observed between cognitive emotion regulation strategies and the positivity effect, but the positive refocusing scores of older participants were higher than those of younger participants. Findings that contradict and overlap with the basic assumptions of Socio-Emotional Selectivity Theory are discussed.