Derek Isaacowitz, Ph.D. - US grants

NIA Pilot Research Grant Program, Objective 12: Cognition in Context : This project aims to use a novel methodological approach to the investigation of a primary issue in the study of socioemotional development in adulthood and old age: namely, how it is possible that most older individuals report being happy and satisfied with their lives, despite the changes they face as they age. One theory that has been offered to account for this phenomenon is socioemotional selectivity theory, which posits that emotions become more salient to individuals with age; this increased focus on emotion in cognitive processing allows older individuals to proactively regulate their emotions. If emotional material is indeed more salient to older individuals, how does this happen? It is unlikely that emotions are more salient to older individuals simply because they appraise or interpret information in a more emotion-focused way than do younger adults, suggesting that the way in which emotion is more salient to them takes place earlier in information processing than the final steps of interpretation and reframing. Emotional material may thus receive preferential treatment in the attentional processes of older adults, and this preference or bias relatively early in information processing may underlie the increased salience of emotion across many domains of their functioning. It may be the case that emotional material is simply more salient overall than is nonemotional material to older adults, or rather that older individuals show an attentional preference for positive over negative emotional stimuli. Either could help promote successful emotion regulation. This proposal aims to directly study whether there are attentional mechanisms underlying the increased salience of emotion to older individuals by using an eye tracker to measure attention to emotional and nonemotional stimuli in real time in adults of different ages. The project has two primary goals: 1. To examine whether emotion is more salient to the cognitive processing of older as compared with younger individuals, by evaluating attentional preferences to emotional vs. nonemotional and to positive vs. negative emotional stimuli; and 2. To develop and test different methods for assessing these preferences in adults of different ages. The primary hypotheses of the project are that older individuals will demonstrate greater attentional preferences for emotional over non-emotional, as well as for positive over negative, visual stimuli as compared to young adults. Two studies will be conducted to test these hypotheses, as well as to refine methods for conducting this type of research in the future. To the extent that these hypotheses are supported, it would suggest that the successful emotion regulation shown by many older individuals arises from biases and preferences in the early, attentional stages of their information processing. The results would also have implications for the etiology and treatment of depression.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Accumulating evidence now points to older individuals being, on average, successful emotion regulators. Socioemotional selectivity theory (Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999) has been offered as a motivational account of how older individuals proactively regulate their socieomotional functioning in the face of decreasing physical and cognitive resources. Recent studies on the cognitive mechanisms that facilitate this emotion regulation have suggested a positivity bias in older adults' information processing. However, while the findings of a positivity bias in aging have been consistent in the memory domain, the evidence for a positivity bias in attention has been more mixed. Moreover, most previous work on these patterns of information processing has simply observed cognitive biases toward emotional information among older adults and assumed that these biases are linked to emotion regulation. The studies in this application aim to directly investigate the role of information processing in on-line regulation of emotional states in adulthood and old age. Eye tracking will be used as a real-time measure of visual attention, and will be combined with other cognitive measures to provide a thorough assessment of on-line emotional processing. The first study will focus on demonstrating that older individuals use information processing as a tool to regulate their emotions as they happen; the second study will use a training paradigm to more conclusively demonstrate causal links between information processing biases and ability to regulate emotions in the face of negative information. Then, the final study will address the critical issue of the adaptive function of such emotion- regulating cognitive biases, by presenting health-relevant negative information and testing whether cognitive biases facilitate feeling good but impair health-promoting behavior. Together, the studies in the application will use cutting-edge technology to discern specifically how older individuals use information processing in the service of emotion regulation and whether this has costs for other processes. This work has clear implications not just for understanding socioemotional development in adulthood and old age, but also for clarifying causal links between cognition, ability to regulate emotions, and health-related outcomes. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In our past work using stationary eye tracking, we have shown that older adults with good attentional abilities can successfully use attentional deployment to regulate their moods in real- time. More recently, we have investigated situation selection as a distinct emotion regulation strategy by creating a choice-laden Affective Environment in which participants of different ages make choices among emotional stimuli as they might do in their everyday lives. The current proposal uses mobile eye tracking in the Affective Environment in order to combine the study of attentional deployment with situation selection. The project will investigate how younger, middle-aged, and older adults dynamically use both situation selection and attentional deployment in real-time to regulate how they feel. This work is developmental and exploratory; no previous work has used mobile eye tracking to study emotion regulation. Doing so requires tackling a serious data processing limitation. Every participant's environment is idiosyncratic as a function of their choices, rendering their visual fixation data hard to interpret using currently available software systems. To solve this problem, psychologists working on mobile eye tracking will partner with computer scientists working in game design to create a custom program for associating fixations with selected stimuli, permitting more automated processing and analysis of data. Two studies will be conducted with younger, middle-aged, and older adults: in both, participants will spend time in the Affective Environment after a mood induction (negative mood in Study 1, positive mood in Study 2) and will be instructed to either regulate to the best possible mood state, or to interact naturally wit the environment. Choices and fixations will be recorded with mobile eye tracking and our newly-created software, and mood will be recorded in real-time. Analyses will test the extent to which there are age differences in choices and fixations, as well as how these choices and fixations predict real-time mood regulation. In addition to testing the interplay of situation selection and attentional deployment in real-time ambulatory emotion regulation, this project will yield a method and software that can be used by other labs to study dynamic fixation and emotion regulation across the lifespan.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Older adults show positivity effects in their attention toward emotional stimuli; using stationary eye tracking, our past work has found that older adults fixate less on negative stimuli. More recent work with mobile eye tracking suggests that, in some cases, older adults may also select fewer negative situations to interact with than younger adults. There is also evidence that older adults are more effective at positive reappraisal than younger adults. These are three ways in which older adults may display more positivity in their processing of emotional information, and potentially their emotion regulation than do younger adults. While age-related positivity effects were originally conceptualized as part of Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST), they may also have implications for emotion regulation. The current application aims to empirically marry the SST-based approach to studying age-related positivity effects with the Process Model approach to studying emotion regulation, by examining age differences in positive forms of emotion regulation, such as positive looking and positive reappraisal. The application considers 2 questions: Are there are differences in preferences for different types of positive emotion regulation strategies, and are there are differences in the effectiveness of different positive emotion regulation strategies in terms of real-time mood change? Three studies will examine age differences in preferences and effectiveness of potentially positive emotion regulation strategies, from younger adulthood through midlife and into old age. Study 1 is a laboratory-based study that will investigate the rol of age in preferences for, and effectiveness of, the emotion regulation strategies specified in the Process Model: situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modification. Study 2 will use experience sampling to investigate age differences in preferences for, and effectiveness of, these strategies in emotion regulation in everyday life. Study 3 will directly test whether shifting goals can account for age differences in the use and effectiveness of positive emotion regulation strategies. Findings will advance our understanding of aging and emotion regulation, and may suggest targets for intervention for those who are not able to regulate emotions successfully.

Our goal is to assess how affect regulation strategies are protective of cognitive and affective functioning in those who are at risk of suffering age-related disorders of mood and cognition. According to RFA MH-17-405, studies of maturational shifts in affect regulation often yield inconsistent findings and the neurobiological systems that support affect regulation remain largely untested. In this application, we propose to closely investigate the dynamics and mechanisms of two maturational trajectories that impact affect regulation: increasing age and beta-amyloid plaques within the brain. To date, most efforts have focused on age-related changes in valence regulation (e.g., the age-related positivity effect). Arousal is acknowledged as important, but very little is known about how older adults actively regulate their arousal states, or the proximal and longer- term consequences of such regulation attempts for risk of suffering age-related changes in mood and cognition. Recent findings from our team suggest that those who optimize for momentary comfort cultivate arousal-avoidance affect regulation trajectories, whereas those who optimize for mastery in memory and attention cultivate grit trajectories (the ability to tolerate momentary unpleasantness in the service of some goal that requires effort, which is often transiently experienced as an unpleasant aroused state). Our work also suggests that affect regulation is associated with both the structure and connectivity within two of the brain's core networks: the salience and default mode networks. In older adults, beta-amyloid (A?) plaques within these two networks are a key pathology?one of the two major molecular hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease (AD)? associated with elevated risk of cognitive decline, symptoms of depression, and dementia. With these observations in mind, our team will combine (a) innovative theory and methods from the study of normal maturational changes in situation-focused affect regulation, (b) structural, functional, and molecular brain imaging, and (c) innovative computational modeling of spatial and temporal dynamics in one large five year study designed to examine how arousal-regulation is associated with changing age and A? status. We will characterize situation-focused arousal regulation strategies and cognitive effort at various levels of difficulty using behavioral, experiential, and neurobiological levels of analysis, both in the behavioral lab and during brain scanning. Data analysis will involve constructing dynamic temporal trajectories across performance in each task to characterize arousal-avoidance and grit (i.e., tolerance of high arousal in the service of effort). We will characterize and compare arousal-avoiding and grit regulation trajectories in individuals who vary in age (from 40 to 90 years old), A? status, cognitive impairment, and mood symptomatology (distinguishing two types of symptoms: distress (negativity) and apathy (lack of effort or engagement). The findings from the proposed research will be used to develop a longer-term project to determine how the temporal dynamics of affect regulation predict developmental/maturational trajectories for mood disorders and cognitive impairment.