Laura Carstensen

We then ran a study of autobiographical memory, again, same finding, using neuroimaging, where you look at amygdala activation in response to the negative, the neutral, the positive.

And again, what we see is more amygdala activation in response to positive viewings,

than the viewing of negative images in older people.

And again, let me loop this back to some of the thinking about how negative aging was years ago.

Prior to the study we did, and this was a study published in the early 2000s, but prior to that, there'd only been one study where they looked at amygdala activation in response to emotional stimuli, but the researchers had only used negative stimuli

And older people didn't remember them as well.

And so the conclusion was that the amygdala is broken.

I mean, there's some neural impairment.

But what we showed is the amygdala is activated just fine in response to positive stimuli.

And many people, by the way, think of the amygdala as more of a salience indicator than emotion per se, right?

So it's what is

capturing attention, what's valuable in attention.

And since then, as I say, there are now hundreds of studies showing the positivity effect.

Exactly.

So people have long believed that negative stimuli have powerful, adaptive, evolutionarily based value.

And so, of course, people, and that was the way these studies were described, people will pay more attention to negative stimuli than positive.

However, people, as it turns out, were young college students in virtually all of these studies.

So we were generalizing from what younger people were observed to do to humans writ large.

And actually what we see now, if we look at the body of research that has emerged since we first identified the positivity effect in cognitive processing, is that there's a gradual age effect in it.

And yes, younger people pay more attention to negative stimuli than positive.