Processing Faces with Emotional Expressions: Negative Faces Cause Greater Stroop Interference for Young and Older Adults Gabrielle Osborne 1, Deborah Burke and David Clausen 2 1 Claremont Graduate University. 2 Pomona College. Method Procedure A red, green, blue, or brown dot was superimposed on the faces. Participants were told to ignore the face and name the color of the dot as quickly as possible. Across participants, each face was seen with each colored dot. Practice: 20 trials with non-experimental faces. Experimental trials: 160 trials with each stimulus appearing once across 2 repetitions. Faces from the same valence group were presented individually in blocks of 5. Valence block was randomized across repetitions and participants. After a 10-min delay participants completed a recognition test. Participants then rated the faces for valence on a 1-7 point scale and arousal on a 1-9pt scale. Results Color-naming times: ANOVA Main effects: – latencies were slower for the negative set of stimuli (negative & negative_neutral) than the positive set (positive & neutral_positive) – latencies were slower for the emotional stimuli (negative & positive) than the neutral stimuli (negative_neutral & positive_neutral). - latencies were slower for older than young adults. Interactions: - negative stimuli were significantly slower than negative_neutral but positive stimuli did not differ from positive_neutral. Introduction This research examines two basic issues: First, the perception of emotion appears to be well maintained in old age, and older adults show preferential attention to positive over negative emotional information relative to young adults (Mather & Carstensen, 2003). Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST) accounts for these findings by postulating that older adults seek emotionally gratifying experiences by focusing on positive information and avoiding negative information more than young adults (e.g., Carstensen & Mikels, 2005; Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999). However, the positivity effect is not always found; identifying the critical conditions which yield a positivity effect is important for understanding the mechanisms that underlie this effect. Second, age-related declines in specific cognitive processes are eliminated under some conditions when emotional stimuli are involved (e.g., Mikels, et al., 2005). Here we test whether the benefit of emotional processing applies to a specific executive process, namely inhibition. According to inhibition deficit (ID) theory, older adults are less able to ignore distracting information (Hasher & Zacks, 1988) and show greater Stroop interference than young adults (e.g., Spieler et al., 1996). Wurm, et al. (2004) reported that older but not young adults showed greater Stroop interference for high arousal than lower arousal emotional basewords. This suggests emotional stimuli do not ameliorate hypothesized inhibition deficits. In contrast, however, Osborne et al. (2006) reported comparable Stroop interference effects across age for negative high arousal basewords, contrary to age-related inhibition deficits. The present study. We use a new variant of the emotion Stroop to test interference from faces with negative and positive expressions. The faces are identical to those used in an earlier study in which older but not young adults showed an attentional bias towards viewing faces with positive expressions and away from viewing faces with negative expressions (Mather & Carstensen, 2003). In the Stroop framework, a positivity effect would be demonstrated if older but not young adults direct their attention to and thus show greater Stroop interference for faces with positive compared to neutral expressions. We also evaluated the effect of emotional stimuli on inhibitory processing. The ID model predicts that older but not young adults will show greater interference for faces with emotional expressions versus neutral expressions because age-linked inhibition deficits impair the ability to ignore distracting material. On the other hand, if emotion strengthens older adults’ cognitive processes, Stroop interference should be equivalent across age. Method Participants 36 young (M = 19 years) and 36 old (M = 72 years) adults. All participants reported English as their first language. Materials The experimental trials consisted of: 20 faces with a happy expression (positive) same 20 faces with a neutral expression (positive_neutral). 20 faces with a sad expression (negative) same 20 faces with a neutral expression (negative_neutral). All stimuli were from Mather and Carstensen (2003) 40 foils for the recognition test consisted of: stimuli from Mather and Carstensen (2003) that did not appear in the experimental trials pictures of faces retrieved from matched with Mather and Carstensen’s (2003) stimuli for size, aspect ratio, color, resolution, and contrast, using Adobe Photoshop. There was no difference in participants’ valence and arousal ratings for experimental and foil stimuli. Results Recognition: ANOVA Main effects: – more emotional stimuli (negative & positive) were recognized than neutral stimuli (negative_neutral & positive_neutral). - more negative stimuli (negative & negative_neutral) were recognized than positive stimuli (positive & positive_neutral). – NO age difference in number of faces recognized overall. Ratings confirmed classification of stimuli. Conclusion Both young and older adults showed greater interference (longer dot color naming latencies) for faces with negative expressions. Both young and older adults showed higher recognition of faces with emotional expressions (negative & positive) than neutral expressions (negative_neutral & positive_neutral), and better recognition for the negative (negative & negative_neutral) than the positive set of faces. There was no evidence of a positivity effect in young or older adults’ attention to or memory for faces with emotional expressions. This suggests the positivity effect is only observed under specific experimental conditions (Carstensen et al., 2006) The equivalent interference for young and older adults with negative emotional faces is inconsistent with age-related inhibition deficits (Wurm et al., 2004). However, these findings are consistent with the negative valence effects reported in previous Stroop tasks using emotional basewords (e.g., Osborne et al., 2006). Young and older adults showed equivalent recognition memory for the experimental stimuli. This suggests young and older adults process faces with emotional expressions similarly. Overall in the Stroop selective attention paradigm we find no evidence that young and older adults process faces with emotional expressions differently. Moreover, contrary to ID theory, the hypothesized greater Stroop interference for older adults relative to young adults was not obtained with emotional face distracters. * * * p<.01 latencies were slower for negative than negative_neutral trials NegativeNeutral_NegativePositiveNeutral_Positive VALENCE (7 point scale) Young Old AROUSAL (9 point scale) Young Old “Blue” Negative condition “Brown” Negative_neutral condition “Red” Positive condition “Green” Positive_neutral condition