Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Neural Activity, Neural Connectivity, And The Processing Of Emotionally-Valenced Information In Older Adults: Links With Life Satisfaction, Robert J. Waldinger, Elizabeth A. Kensinger, Marc S. Schulz

Psychology Faculty Research and Scholarship

This study examines whether differences in late-life well-being are linked to how older adults encode emotionally-valenced information. Using fMRI with 39 older adults varying in life satisfaction, we examined how viewing positive and negative images affected activation and connectivity of an emotion-processing network. Participants engaged most regions within this network more robustly for positive than for negative images, but within the PFC this effect was moderated by life satisfaction, with individuals higher in satisfaction showing lower levels of activity during the processing of positive images. Participants high in satisfaction showed stronger correlations among network regions – particularly between the amygdala …