The Role of Personality in the Occurence of the Positivity Effect in Older Adults.

Several research findings indicate that older adults (OA) focus more on positive information compared to negative information. According to the socio-emotional selectivity theory, this positivity effect in attention results from an increased motivation to allocate resources to emotion regulation due to the limited time span of OA. Yet, results on this effect are not always consistent. Personality may be a confounding factor in the positivity effect, since this has been found to play a role in attentional processing in younger adults (YA). The current study is the first to explore whether personality is also linked to attention in OA. Based on results in YA, we hypothesize that OA scoring higher on extraversion and positive emotionality, will focus more on positive information, and that OA scoring higher on neuroticism and negative emotionality, will have a greater focus on negative information. Personality traits were measured by the MMPI-2-RF-PSY-5 and the NEO-FFI scales. Attentional focus was examined with the Engagement-disengagement task. In this task eye-movements were registered to see how fast participants can switch their attention towards or away from emotional faces. The study results (N = 33, mean age 72.7, age range 66 - 90, 57.6 % males) supported our hypotheses partly. Neuroticism and negative emotionality were moderately correlated with faster disengagement from happy faces, while extraversion was moderately correlated with less maintained attention to angry faces. Although there was a medium effect size between positive emotionality and more attention to happy faces, the correlation was only trend significant (p = .69). Moreover, extraversion also had moderate to high correlations with attention to sad faces. We conclude that personality may indeed be a confounding factor in the occurrence of the positivity effect in OA. Nevertheless, more data needs to be collected to further analyze the robustness of differences found between OA and YA, and to clarify unexpected results, and their consequences into more detail.