Age differences in affective coloring of emotional pictures onto neutral faces
Creators: name: Urban-Wojcik, Emily
name: Finley, Anna
name: Quinlan, Laurel
name: Mumford, Jeanette
name: Schaefer, Stacey
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology
subject: affective chronometry
subject: aging
subject: emotional recovery
subject: fMRI

description: Growing older is accompanied by declines in physical and cognitive health, but paradoxically, research has documented higher levels of well-being among successively older adults (Carstensen et al., 2011; Stone, Schwartz, Broderick, &amp; Deaton, 2010). This is particularly noteworthy given that greater well-being is related to fewer symptoms of physical health issues and pain (Carstensen et al., 2001; Pressman &amp; Cohen, 2005), better disease and symptom control (Howell, Kern, &amp; Lyubomirsky, 2007), and decreased risk of mortality(Carstensen et al., 2001). Ensuring well-being continues to improve among older adult populations would greatly enhance the quality of life among older individuals and decrease the social and financial burden. One key factor that relates to well-being is the way individuals respond to emotional events (Charles, Piazza, Mogle, Sliwinski, &amp; Almeida, 2013; Grosse Rueschkamp, Kuppens, Riediger, Blanke, &amp; Brose, 2018; Hardy &amp; Segerstrom, 2017; Heller et al, 2013; Schaefer et al, 2013; Javaras et al., 2012). Research from our lab has demonstrated that individuals vary greatly in their emotional response styles, or the way that they initially react to emotional events and stimuli and how their initial emotional experience “colors” subsequently experienced stimuli (i.e., affective coloring; Heller et al, 2013; Schaefer et al, 2013; Javaras et al., 2012; Lapate et al., 2014). Affective coloring is thought of as an indicator of how quickly an individual recovers from a previous emotional provocation. The more a neutral stimulus that follows an emotional stimulus is “colored” by the emotional stimulus, the longer the delay in recovery the subject is inferred to have. Most research exploring these questions has focused on emotional responses to negative events, particularly the initial reactivity to such events. The lab studies that compare reactivity to affective coloring have demonstrated that recovery (as operationalized by the extent of affective coloring) may matter more to well-being outcomes than initial reactivity. Therefore, our lab group is attempting to characterize individual differences in affective coloring and to further investigate differences in affective coloring as a function of emotional valence. Understanding individual differences in emotional response styles and affective coloring processes, especially how emotional response styles and affective coloring may change with age, has the potential to inform improvements in overall well-being and subsequent physical health. Affective reactivity and affective coloring to emotional provocation can be measured in a number of ways. In the fMRI portion of the MIDUS Refresher neuroscience project, affective reactivity and affective coloring are operationalized through brain activity, self-reported liking of stimuli, and memory for stimuli. In this paradigm (see https://osf.io/35sk6/ for a more detailed description), neutral faces were presented following emotionally valenced IAPS pictures. Brain activation was recorded during the image and face viewing, and participants were later asked to recall which neutral faces they had seen previously and how much they liked the neutral faces. Grupe and colleagues (2018) used these data to test initial hypotheses regarding affective coloring in amygdala activation, liking of neutral faces, and memory for neutral faces. They also examined age as a covariate, but did not pursue follow-up analyses to better understand how affective coloring differs across the adult lifespan. The analyses we are pre-registering here will provide a more detailed follow-up of the age differences in affective coloring that were reported in Grupe et al., (2018), including an examination of additional brain regions that are implicated in emotional processing and regulation.