Barber Sarah J, Opitz Philipp C, Martins Bruna, Sakaki Michiko, Mather Mara
Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94132, USA.
Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2016 Aug;44(6):869-82. doi: 10.3758/s13421-016-0612-0.
Compared with younger adults, older adults have a relative preference to attend to and remember positive over negative information. This is known as the "positivity effect," and researchers have typically evoked socioemotional selectivity theory to explain it. According to socioemotional selectivity theory, as people get older they begin to perceive their time left in life as more limited. These reduced time horizons prompt older adults to prioritize achieving emotional gratification and thus exhibit increased positivity in attention and recall. Although this is the most commonly cited explanation of the positivity effect, there is currently a lack of clear experimental evidence demonstrating a link between time horizons and positivity. The goal of the current research was to address this issue. In two separate experiments, we asked participants to complete a writing activity, which directed them to think of time as being either limited or expansive (Experiments 1 and 2) or did not orient them to think about time in a particular manner (Experiment 2). Participants were then shown a series of emotional pictures, which they subsequently tried to recall. Results from both studies showed that regardless of chronological age, thinking about a limited future enhanced the relative positivity of participants' recall. Furthermore, the results of Experiment 2 showed that this effect was not driven by changes in mood. Thus, the fact that older adults' recall is typically more positive than younger adults' recall may index naturally shifting time horizons and goals with age.
与年轻人相比，老年人相对更倾向于关注和记住积极信息而非消极信息。这被称为“积极效应”，研究人员通常援引社会情感选择性理论来解释这一现象。根据社会情感选择性理论，随着人们年龄的增长，他们开始觉得自己生命中剩余的时间越来越有限。这些缩短的时间视野促使老年人将实现情感满足作为优先事项，从而在注意力和回忆方面表现出更强的积极性。尽管这是对积极效应最常被引用的解释，但目前缺乏明确的实验证据来证明时间视野与积极性之间的联系。当前研究的目的就是解决这个问题。在两项独立的实验中，我们要求参与者完成一项写作活动，引导他们将时间视为有限或无限（实验1和实验2），或者不引导他们以特定方式思考时间（实验2）。然后向参与者展示一系列情感图片，随后让他们尝试回忆。两项研究的结果都表明，无论实际年龄如何，思考有限的未来都会增强参与者回忆的相对积极性。此外，实验2的结果表明，这种效应并非由情绪变化驱动。因此，老年人的回忆通常比年轻人的回忆更积极这一事实，可能表明随着年龄增长，时间视野和目标自然地发生了转变。
