Title:
Emotion Biases in Older and Younger Adults: Novelty Preference as an Index of Attention

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dc.contributor.author Brauer, Anne Lisa en_US
dc.contributor.department Psychology en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2008-02-19T20:55:17Z
dc.date.available 2008-02-19T20:55:17Z
dc.date.issued 2007-12-17 en_US
dc.description.abstract Past research indicates that emotionally-relevant stimuli attract visual attention, but also that the relationship between emotion and attention allocation varies between young and older adults. Although both young and older adults respond automatically to threatening stimuli, older adults spend more time attending to positive stimuli, while younger adults attend more to all types of emotional stimuli. This age difference is proposed to be an effect of older adults emotion-regulation goals in attention allocation. The present study used eye tracking to establish a sensitive measure of attention novelty preference and to observe the age-disparate effects of emotional valence on overt visual attention over time. Although older and younger adults showed similar novelty preferences to emotional (happy, angry, sad) stimuli compared to neutral and familiar stimuli, the time course of effect varied between the groups. Older adults allocated more attention to negative stimuli in the first few seconds of looking and more toward stimuli near the end of the 10-second looking period, whereas younger adults preferred all emotional stimuli to neutral and to familiar stimuli throughout the looking period. Novelty preference appears to be an effective way to measure differences in preferences for emotional information between age groups. en_US
dc.description.advisor Committee Member/Second Reader: Blanchard-Fields, Fredda; Faculty Mentor: Corballis, Paul en_US
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1853/19949
dc.publisher Georgia Institute of Technology en_US
dc.subject Visual attention en_US
dc.subject Emotion en_US
dc.subject Emotion regulation en_US
dc.subject Aging en_US
dc.subject Eye tracking en_US
dc.subject Positivity en_US
dc.title Emotion Biases in Older and Younger Adults: Novelty Preference as an Index of Attention en_US
dc.type Text
dc.type.genre Undergraduate Thesis
dspace.entity.type Publication
local.contributor.corporatename College of Sciences
local.contributor.corporatename School of Psychology
local.contributor.corporatename Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program
local.relation.ispartofseries Undergraduate Research Option Theses
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication 85042be6-2d68-4e07-b384-e1f908fae48a
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication 768a3cd1-8d73-4d47-b418-0fc859ce897d
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication 0db885f5-939b-4de1-807b-f2ec73714200
relation.isSeriesOfPublication e1a827bd-cf25-4b83-ba24-70848b7036ac
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