Department of Neurology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York, USA.
Int J Neurosci. 2011 Aug;121(8):430-6. doi: 10.3109/00207454.2011.568656. Epub 2011 May 17.
Whereas aging affects cognitive and psychomotor processes negatively, the impact of aging on emotional processing is less clear. Using an "old-new" binary decision task, we ascertained the modulation of response latencies after presentation of neutral and emotional pictures in "young" (M = 27.1 years) and "young-old" adults with a mean age below 60 (M = 57.7 years). Stimuli varied on valence (pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant) and arousal (high and low) dimensions. Young-old adults had significantly longer reaction times. However, young and young-old adults showed the exact same pattern of response time modulation by emotional stimuli: Response latencies were longer for high-arousal than for low-arousal pictures and longer for negative than for positive or neutral stimuli. This result suggests that the specific effects of implicitly processed emotional valence and arousal information on behavioral response time are preserved in young-old adults despite significant age-related psychomotor decline.
虽然衰老会对认知和心理运动过程产生负面影响，但衰老对情绪处理的影响尚不明确。本研究采用“旧新”二分决策任务，在呈现中性和情绪图片后，测量了“年轻”（M=27.1 岁）和平均年龄低于 60 岁的“年轻老年人”（M=57.7 岁）的反应时潜伏期的变化。刺激在效价（愉快、中性和不愉快）和唤醒度（高和低）维度上有所不同。年轻老年人的反应时明显更长。然而，年轻老年人表现出完全相同的情绪刺激反应时调制模式：高唤醒度图片的反应时比低唤醒度图片长，负性刺激比正性或中性刺激的反应时长。这一结果表明，尽管存在显著的与年龄相关的心理运动下降，但在年轻老年人中，内隐处理的情绪效价和唤醒度信息对行为反应时的特定影响仍然得以保留。
