Motivational orientation in adulthood: Correlates and mechanisms of age-related differences in approach and avoidance
Final Report Abstract
Aging is typically associated with deficits in attention and memory. During my postdoctoral research at Yale University, I investigated how this pattern of agerelated decline in attention and memory loss is importantly qualified when considering information that is motivationally or emotionally relevant. In particular, my research, in which I used a range of methods that combined self-report, behavior observation and neuroimaging techniques, suggests that both young and older adults show attention and memory biases for own-age compared to other-age faces with important behavioral consequences (e.g., in terms of the ability to read facial emotions in others). In my future work, I will further extent this research, by specifically targeting several of the potentially underlying mechanisms identified in my work so far (e.g., familiarity, self-reference), with the goal to get a better understanding of the processes that lead to attention and memory biases in samples of young and older adults and age-related shifts in motivational-emotional orientation referring to developmental change processes in brain and behavior.
Publications
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(2009). Age-group differences in medial cortex activity associated with thinking about self-relevant agendas. Psychology and Aging, 24, 438–449
Mitchell, K. J., Raye, C. L., Ebner, N. C., Tubridy, S. M., Frankel, H., & Johnson, M. K.
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(2009). Young and older emotional faces: Are there age-group differences in expression identification and memory? Emotion, 9, 329–339
Ebner, N. C., & Johnson, M. K.
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(2010). Age-group differences in interference from young and older emotional faces. Cognition & Emotion, 24, 1095–1116
Ebner, N. C., & Johnson, M. K.
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(2011). Age and emotion affect how we look at a face: Visual scan patterns differ for own-age versus other-age emotional faces. [Special section] Cognition & Emotion. Advance online publication
Ebner, N. C., He, Y., & Johnson, M. K.
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(2011). Electrophysiological correlates of processing faces of younger and older individuals. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 6, 526-535
Ebner, N. C., He, Y., Fichtenholtz, H. M., McCarthy, G. & Johnson, M. K.
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(2011). Medial prefrontal cortex activity when thinking about others depends on their age. [Special issue] Neurocase, 17, 260-269
Ebner, N. C., Gluth, S., Johnson, M. R., Raye, C. L., Mitchell, K. M., & Johnson, M. K.
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(2011). What predicts the own-age bias in face recognition memory? Social Cognition, 29, 97–119
He, Y., Ebner, N. C., & Johnson, M. K.
