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Influences of Age on Emotional Reactivity During Picture Processing

¹ Department of Kinesiology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
² Department of Physiology and Kinesiology, University of Florida, Gainesville.

Address correspondence to Charles H. Hillman, Department of Kinesiology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 213 Freer Hall, 906 S. Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801. E-mail: chhillma{at}uiuc.edu

We compared emotional reactivity to affective pictures for 32 older (60–71 years) and 34 younger (18–23 years) adults. We collected the startle-blink reflex, N1 and P3 components of the probe-evoked event-related brain potential, corrugator electromyogram, heart rate, and self-report measures of pleasure and arousal. Self-report findings indicated that older, compared with younger, adults reported greater overall pleasure and arousal. Older adults also exhibited decreased N1 and P3 amplitude, corrugator activity, and heart rate deceleration compared with younger adults. The startle-blink reflex revealed that older adults exhibited increased startle-blink magnitude compared with younger adults during unpleasant pictures, with no age differences observed for pleasant and neutral contents. These age differences suggest that older adults have differential reactivity to affective picture viewing, and they indicate that age-related changes in emotion are not unitary across response systems.