Age differences in proactive and reactive control: valence asymmetries in the processing of complex emotional scenes

This study investigates age differences in proactive and reactive control during emotional scene processing, using complex scenes that require effortful top-down interpretation. Sixty-two participants (32 young and 30 older adults) completed an emotional AX-CPT task with positive, negative, and neutral scenes. Results revealed that the relative balance between proactive and reactive control in older adults was asymmetrically shaped by emotional valence when processing complex perceptually demanding stimuli. For positive scenes, older adults showed a relative reliance on proactive control, evidenced by higher Proactive Behavioral Index (PBI) scores. For negative scenes, they exhibited reduced proactive control, with higher error rates on neutral-negative sequences, whereas young adults showed the opposite pattern. Because the experimental design did not include a facial-expression comparison condition, conclusions about stimulus-type moderation are necessarily tentative. Nevertheless, these findings provide initial evidence that valence-specific control asymmetries are expressed under conditions of high conceptual and perceptual demand. Older adults appeared to differentially deploy control resources for positive versus negative stimuli under demanding conditions. This study provides new evidence that adaptive control is dynamically reshaped by the processing demands associated with complex emotional materials, offering a foundation for future research examining how stimulus complexity interacts with motivational priorities in aging.