Transcript Rosa, E., & Burke, D. (2008, April).

Positive Emotion in Language Production: Age Differences in Emotional Valence of
Stories
Elise Rosa and Deborah Burke
Pomona College
Older adults report increased feelings of well-being, greater contentment and
less anxiety in their daily lives compared to young adults (Charles, Reynolds,
and Gatz, 2001; Mroczek & Kolarz, 1998). Socioemotional selectivity theory
proposes that emotional gratification becomes more important towards the end
of the life span and accordingly older adults tend to emphasize positive rather
than negative emotions compared to young adults (e.g., Mather & Carstensen,
2005). Within this framework, older adults’ emotional goals shape cognitive
processes so that they maximize meaningful emotional experience. The
proposed positivity bias in cognitive processing has been supported in some
studies of attention and memory performance, but there has been little
investigation of an age-related positivity bias in language production.
The present study investigates language production in the form of story
telling because stories provide an opportunity to express emotional goals.
Indeed, James, Burke, Austen & Hulme (1998) found that older adults’
autobiographical stories were rated as more interesting than young adults’ and
were distinguished by their emphasis on finding meaning in events. Pasupathi,
Henry and Carstensen (2002) reported that older adults’ stories for children
used fewer negative words than younger adults’ although there were no age
differences in the use of positive emotion words. The present research
investigates younger and older adults’ production of positive and negative
emotion words in their stories about neutral picture stimuli.
Method- Experiment 1
•Participants
• 20 college students (M = 20.3 years, 12 men and 8 women) and 20 healthy
older adults (M = 71.25 years, 13 women and 7 men).
•Materials
• 5 pictures from the International Affective Picture System set. All featured
people with neutral expressions on their faces as shown in the two examples
below.
•The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program was used to
measure the positive and negative emotion words in the stories.
•This program has a dictionary of over 4,500 words and word stems that are
in turn categorized into different subsets based on their qualities.
•The program produces percentage scores for various aspects of the text that
is entered.
•Positive and negative emotion scores were obtained for each story and
these were averaged for the 5 stories yielding a mean positive score and a
mean negative score for each participant.
Results- Experiment 1
•Positive Emotion- Older adults produced a greater percentage of positive
emotion words (M = 2.44) in their stories than young adults (M = 1.76), t =
2.58, p < .014. There was no age difference in percent of negative words (M
= 1.00 and M = 1.02 for older and young adults, respectively).
Positive Words
Mean Percent of Total Words
Introduction
3
2.5
2
Method- Experiment 2
•Participants
•16 college student (M = 18.69 years, 8 men and 8 women) and 16 healthy
older adults (M = 72.87 years, 11 women and 5 men).
•Materials
•The 200 transcripts from Experiment 1 were divided into 4 groups of 50
stories each, 25 from older adults and 25 from young adults.
•A rating sheet with 50 scales of 1-5 for positive and 1-5 for negative emotion.
•Procedure
• Participants were given one of the 4 packets of 50 stories and a rating sheet
Instructions were to read each story and mark a rating on the corresponding
positive and negative scales for each story.
Results- Experiment 2
• Ratings were analyzed in an ANOVA with rater age (young, old), storyteller
age (young, old), and rating (positive, negative) as variables.
• There was a main effect of rater age because older adults gave higher
positive and negative ratings than young adults (M = 2.44 and 2..77 for
young and older adults respectively).
• Storyteller age interacted with positive and negative ratings, such that older
storytellers were rated as more positive than younger storytellers but less
negative, F(1,30) = 9.46, p < .04. See Figure 3.
1.5
1
Young Storytellers
0.5
Older Storytellers
3
0
Young
Older
Figure 1: Mean percentage positive emotion words
Error bars = 1 standard deviation
2.5
2
1.5
1
Mean Percent of Total Words
Negative Words
• All pictures were presented as color photocopies.
•Procedure
• Participants were tested individually, and were informed they would be
shown 5 pictures and asked to make up a 3-5 minutes story about each one.
•They were told the stories should be fictional, but could reflect events from
their own lives if they wished. They were presented with a list of questions to
help them form their stories as indicated below:
What is happening?
Who are the people?
What has led up to this situation?
What are the feelings of the person or people?
•Participants’ stories were recorded with a tape recorder.
•Stories were transcribed with filler words (um, okay) and restarts removed.
0.5
3
2.5
0
Positivity Rating
Negativity Rating
Figure 3: Mean positive and negative emotion ratings
2
1.5
Conclusions- Experiment 2
1
0.5
0
Young
Older
Figure 2: Mean percentage negative emotion words
Error bars = 1 standard deviation
Conclusions- Experiment 1
•Older adults use more positive words in stories about neutral stimuli than do
young adults.
• Young and older adults do not differ significantly in their use of negative
emotion in stories about neutral stimuli.
• Both young and older adults rated older adults stories as more positive and
less negative than younger adults’.
• Older adults rated stories as more positive and more negative than younger
adults, suggesting they are more sensitive to emotional content of the story
References
Charles, S.T., Reynolds, C.A., & Gatz, M. (2001). Age-related differences and change in positive and negative
affect over twenty-three years. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 136-151.
James, L.E., Burke, D.M., Austin, A., & Hulme, E. (1998). Production and perception of "verbosity" in younger and
older adults. Psychology and Aging, 13, 355-367.
Mather, M. & Carstensen, L.L. (2005). Aging and motivated cognition: The positivity effect in attention and memory.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9 (October): 496-502.
Mroczek, D.K. & Kolarz, C.M. (1998). The effect of age on positive and negative affect: A developmental
perspective on happiness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 1333-1349.
Pasupathi, M., Henry, R. & Carstensen, L.L. (2002). Age and ethnicity differences in storytelling to young children:
Emotionality, relationality and socialization. Psychology and Aging, 17, 610-621.
Pennebaker, J.W., Booth, R. J., Francis, M. E. (2001). LIWC [computer software].