Michael Gaebler, Miray Erbey, Josefin Röbbig, and Andrea Reiter | The Leipzig Study for Mind-Body-Emotion Interactions (LEMON) – part 2: "Mind-brain-body interactions in emotional aging"

We assume that psychological factors play a key role in the pathogenesis, manifestation, and treatment of somatic diseases. In younger and older healthy adults, the “Leipzig Study for Mind-Body-Emotion Interactions” (LEMON) investigates the interplay of brain, body, and psychological processes as they are hypothesized to contribute to emotional well-being.

After a general introduction to LEMON by Michael Gaebler, Miray Erbey will present “Differences in positivity bias in attention and emotion perception in younger and older adults”, then Josefin Röbbig will talk about “Emotion Regulation Flexibility in Anger: Age, Anger Intensity and Habitual Reappraisal Use matter”, and Andrea Reiter will explain findings regarding " Learning from Reward and Punishment in Healthy Aging”

1.It is suggested that older adults show a stronger positivity bias (i.e. increased attention and memory for positive stimuli) than younger adults. This phenomenon is known as the “positivity effect” and it is thought to play a role in older adults’ higher levels of well-being. Most studies on the positivity effect focus on age differences and ignore individual variations that exist within the age groups. Here we will present our findings related to 1) age differences in positivity bias in attention and in emotion perception, 2) factors that relate to positivity in attention in younger and older groups 3) the relationship between shortened time horizons, positivity preference and well-being. Our findings suggest that positivity bias is not a mere process of aging, but is related to certain individual characteristics.

2. Successful anger regulation is vital for mental and cardiovascular health. While regulatory outcomes of different emotion regulation strategies have long been studied in an adaptive/maladaptive dichotomy, recent evidence suggests healthy adaptation to be the result of flexible regulation choices according to contextual factors. Previously, using negative pictures of low and high emotional intensity, a preference for disengagement distraction over engagement reappraisal has been found for high intensity pictures, while low intensity pictures were more likely to be regulated with reappraisal. Here, we studied the influence of emotional intensity, age and dispositional reappraisal on emotion regulation choices using autobiographical anger memories. Results indicate that older adults flexibly regulate anger according to emotional intensity and psychometric constitution, replicating previous results for older adults with high habitual reappraisal use.

3. Previous research has shown that older adults do not differ from younger adults during monetary gain anticipation, however older adults show diminished neural signatures of loss anticipation. We were interested in translating this asymmetry to the decision-making domain and asked whether there were age-related differences in decision-making when learning from rewards vs. punishments. Using a behavioral task in combination with computational modeling of Reinforcement Learning to dissociate both types of learning, we show that older adults are particularly impaired in decision-making when their decisions are punished as compared to rewarded.