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

Objectives: Older adults (OA) would focus more on positive and less on negative information compared to younger adults (YA). Yet, results on this attentional positivity effect (PE) are inconsistent. Since personality has been found to relate to attentional processing in YA, we investigated whether differences in personality are linked to attentional processing of emotional information in both YA and OA.
Design: A between-subjects design was used to compare OA and YA.
Method: 120 community dwelling YA and OA were recruited. Personality traits were measured with the MMPI-2-RF-PSY-5 and the BFI scales. Attentional processing was examined with the engagement-disengagement task, which registers eye-movements to see how fast participants engage towards or disengage from happy and sad emotional faces. We applied non-parametric analyses.
Results: In YA no significant correlations were found between personality and attention. In OA, scoring higher on negative emotionality was correlated with engaging faster to (happy p = .067, sad p = .057) but also disengaging faster from (happy p = .055, sad p = .031) emotional stimuli. When scoring higher on neuroticism, OA also disengaged faster from sad faces (p = .075).
Conclusions: Personality was differently related to attentional processing in YA and OA. OA seem to mitigate higher scores on negative emotionality/neuroticism by regulating their attention away from sad information. In YA, no relations were found. Possibly confounding factors are the limited cognitive load of the task or the fact that YA and OA differed on some personality traits.