Abstract :
Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (Carstensen,
L. L., Isaacowitz, D. M., & Charles, S. T. (1999).
American Psychologist, 54, 155–181) posits that older adults,
and anyone else who perceives their time as limited, show a
motivational shift toward emotion regulation which causes
them to exhibit a positivity bias and negativity avoidance in
attention and memory.We testedwhether such amotivational
shift can indeed cause changes in emotional processing by
manipulating motivation in a sample of young adults. After
the manipulation, participants looked at real-world images
while their eye movements were tracked. It was found that
participants motivated to regulate emotion attended less to
negative than positive images and showed less looking time
to all stimulus types compared to the other two conditions.
No evidence was found linking the motivational manipulation
to emotional memory.
