Search results for "Positivity effect"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
Distinct effects of positive and negative music on older adults' auditory target identification performances.
2014
Older adults, compared to younger adults, are more likely to attend to pleasant situations and avoid unpleasant ones. Yet, it is unclear whether such a phenomenon may be generalized to musical emotions. In this study, we investigated whether there is an age-related difference in how musical emotions are experienced and how positive and negative music influences attention performances in a target identification task. Thirty-one young and twenty-eight older adults were presented with 40 musical excerpts conveying happiness, peacefulness, sadness, and threat. While listening to music, participants were asked to rate their feelings and monitor each excerpt for the occurrence of an auditory tar…
Animacy matters: ERP evidence for the multi-dimensionality of topic-worthiness in Chinese
2013
Abstract An event-related potential (ERP) study was conducted to investigate how animacy interacts with givenness during topic processing. Both animacy and givenness have been considered as within-discourse factors that contribute to an element׳s potential to form an optimal topic (i.e., topic-worthiness). ERPs were recorded while participants read question–answer pairs, of which the target sentence induced either a continuation or an alternation of a previously introduced topic (i.e., given vs. new). Depending on the context, a potential topic further differed in its animacy from the preceding one (i.e., animate vs. inanimate). The data revealed a robust givenness effect with an N400 reduc…
Acute stress impairs reward positivity effect in probabilistic learning
2019
Decision making based on feedback learning requires a series of cognitive processes, including estimating the probability of particular outcomes and modulating expectations between expected versus actual outcomes. It has been suggested that stress affects decision making and subsequent processing of feedback valence and magnitude. However, less is known about the effect of acute stress on reward expectancy. In the current study, participants performed a probabilistic learning task, in which they learned an association between response and feedback within different reward expectancy trials (30% and 70%) under the conditions of stress (threat of shock) and safety (no shock). We recorded event…
Dimensional and Discrete Emotional Reactivity in Alzheimer’s Disease: Film Clips as a Research Tool in Dementia
2021
Background: No studies have been conducted to date on the dimensional and discrete classification of emotions to study the emotional reactivity of older adults with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Additionally, the presentation of film clips with affective content is currently one of the most effective and widely used Mood Induction Procedures (MIPS). However, it has been scarcely used in AD patients. Objective: Based on the dimensional and discrete models of emotion, this study examines the emotional reactivity of older adults with AD, using a popular set of film clips to induce emotions. Methods: We compared the responses of older adults aged over 65-years with mild to moderate AD (n = 15) and …
Age differences in olfactory affective responses: evidence for a positivity effect and an emotional dedifferentiation
2021
International audience; Studies on aging and hedonic judgment of odors have never been addressed within the empirical frameworks of age-related changes in emotion which state that advancing age is associated with a reduced negativity bias and a less pronounced differentiation between hedonic valence and emotional intensity judgments. Our aim was to examine and extend these age-related effects into the field of odors. Thirty-eight younger adults and 40 older adults were asked to evaluate the hedonic valence, emotional intensity, and familiarity of 50 odors controlled for their pleasantness. Compared to younger adults, older adults rated unpleasant odorants as less unpleasant and showed an in…