Affect across adulthood: Evidence from English, Dutch, and Spanish

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Sociolinguistics

Background:

• Emotions significantly influence language learning, use, and processing.
• A positivity bias exists, where positive words are more frequent and used more often than negative words.
• Lifelong language experience necessitates examining emotion-laden lexicons across lifespan and languages.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate age-related changes in the processing of valenced words across adulthood.
• To test predictions about age-related trajectories in processing positive and negative words.
• To examine language production and comprehension across adulthood and in a cross-linguistic context.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of written productions (Facebook status updates) from over 20,000 users.
• Utilized behavioral data from three megastudies in English, Dutch, and Spanish.
• Employed a visual word recognition task to assess comprehension and reaction times.

Main Results:

• Increased use of positive word types and tokens with advancing age in language production.
• Consistent effect of valence across languages and cohorts in comprehension.
• Declining difference in reaction times to positive and negative words with age, with slower responses to positive words.

Conclusions:

• Advancing age correlates with increased positive word frequency in production.
• This production pattern is mirrored by a comprehension 'discrimination penalty' for positive words.
• Lifelong learning and emotion regulation likely underlie these age-related changes in language processing.