Older People Summon More Positivity in Response to Distress

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, exposed 249 actors progressed 18 – 88 to a series of film clips that ranged in emotional valence positive (e.g. laughing baby), neutral (e.g. rainfall cast), or negative (e.g. footage of the Rwandan genocide). Study actors were signed from the Cancans (The Cambridge Centre for Aging and Neuroscience) sample, a balanced sample of the UK population anticipated to also represent the Australian population. Actors were asked to simply watch the clips and allow any emotional response to arise naturally or, during half of the negative clips, laboriously reduce any unwanted or distressing negative feelings through a reframing of the negative content. Latterly, actors were asked to record the magnitude of positive and negative responses on a scale and also, on a separate scale, report their perceived success at regulating their emotional response. The experimenters plant that – with adding age – actors replied more appreciatively to both emotional and neutral stimulants and were better suitable to appreciatively reframe a negative experience into a positive bone