Looking While Unhappy

Derek M. Isaacowitz · Kaitlin Toner · Deborah Goren · Hugh R. Wilson

270 citations0/0 files storedPsychological Science

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Aging and Gerontology Research Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies Face Recognition and Perception

Abstract

Recent findings that older adults gaze toward positively valenced stimuli and away from negatively valenced stimuli have been interpreted as part of their attempts to achieve the goal of feeling good. However, the idea that older adults use gaze to regulate mood, and that their gaze does not simply reflect mood, stands in contrast to evidence of mood-congruent processing in young adults. No previous study has directly linked age-related positive gaze preferences to mood regulation. In this eye-tracking study, older and younger adults in a range of moods viewed synthetic face pairs varying in valence. Younger adults demonstrated mood-congruent gaze, looking more at positive faces when in a good mood and at negative faces when in a bad mood. Older adults displayed mood-incongruent positive gaze, looking toward positive and away from negative faces when in a bad mood. This finding suggests that in older adults, gaze does not reflect mood, but rather is used to regulate it.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 270 citations exist upstream.

References

1977The CES-D Scale 1988Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales.1988Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales.1970Manual for the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory 2015Older Adults' Reasons for Using Technology while Aging in Place 1985Optimism, coping, and health: Assessment and implications of generalized outcome expectancies.1999Taking time seriously: A theory of socioemotional selectivity.1955Manual for the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.

Cited by

2011The evolution and psychology of self-deception 2010A meta-analysis of the magnitude of biased attention in depression 2010Rape Myth Beliefs and Bystander Attitudes Among Incoming College Students 2010Fixing Our Focus: Training Attention to Regulate Emotion 2011Age Differences in Brain Activity during Emotion Processing: Reflections of Age-Related Decline or Increased Emotion Regulation

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.