You never lose the ages you've been: affective perspective taking in older adults

Aging appears to be associated with a growing preference for positive over negative information (Carstensen, Mikels, & Mather, 2006). In this study, we investigated potential awareness of the phenomenon by asking older people to recollect material from the perspective of a young person. Young and older participants listened to stories about 25- and 75-year-old main characters and then were asked to retell the stories from the perspective of the main characters. Older adults used relatively more positive than negative words when retelling from the perspective of a 75- versus 25-year-old. Young adults, however, used comparable numbers of positive and negative words regardless of perspective. These findings contribute to a growing literature that points to developmental gains in the emotion domain.