Positivity Effect

The positivity effect is the tendency, found specifically in older adults, to favor positive or neutral information over negative information in both attention and memory, so that positive items make up a larger share of what older adults later remember, compared with younger adults viewing the very same material, and older adults' gaze in eye-tracking studies shifts more readily toward happy faces and away from angry or sad ones. The psychologists Mara Mather and Laura Carstensen and their research collaborators coined the term to describe this specific, age-related pattern, distinguishing it from the broader and much older Pollyanna principle, the general tendency of people of all ages to remember pleasant items somewhat more accurately than unpleasant ones. The leading theoretical account, socioemotional selectivity theory, explains the positivity effect as arising from a motivational shift that comes with age: as older adults perceive their remaining time as more limited, they become more motivated to pursue emotionally meaningful and satisfying goals in the present, which in turn leads them to prioritize positive experiences and to actively regulate their emotional responses to negative ones. Neuroscientific research has linked the effect to greater activation of the prefrontal cortex during emotional processing in older adults, suggesting the pattern reflects active cognitive control being deployed to enhance positive information and diminish negative information, rather than a passive decline in the ability to process complex or threatening material.