This trait, which researchers refer to as “positive bias,” tends to develop with age. According to the socio-emotional selectivity theory, it is a mechanism that helps us focus on the good when our future becomes less certain and rosy. It protects our mental well-being by somewhat diminishing the impact of negative realities.
What Did the Researchers Discover?
Identifying others’ emotions as predominantly positive, according to the researchers, is a sign of and may even serve as an early warning for neurodegenerative diseases, such as .
The team involved 665 participants aged between 18 and 89, divided into age groups with approximately 10-year differences. Volunteers were asked to recognize emotions on computer-generated faces. Participants underwent brain scans using MRI and were tested for signs of cognitive decline and .
As expected, older adults were more likely than younger individuals to identify faces as expressing positive emotions, as reported by Science Alert. In particular, ambiguous or unclear emotions were most often interpreted as positive by older participants.
Brain scan data linked this tendency to a lower amount of gray matter in the hippocampus and amygdala—regions responsible for processing emotions.
The age-related tendency to perceive facial emotions as positive is associated not only with cognitive decline but also with symptoms of depression, the researchers noted.
This acquired trait supports the theory that positive bias arises from the deterioration of specific brain regions.
These findings complement previous research linking cognitive decline to an inability to recognize emotions, which is also observed in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists have suggested that the part of the brain responsible for recognizing others’ emotions may be damaged in cases of developing dementia.
Negative emotions presented in these experiments, such as anger, fear, and sadness, were more challenging to identify than positive ones like happiness, which also partially explains the results obtained.
Neurobiologist Noham Volpe, the lead author of the study from Tel Aviv University, stated: “We are currently investigating how these results relate to older adults who show early signs of cognitive decline, especially those exhibiting signs of apathy, which is often another early indicator of dementia.”
The study’s findings were published in the journal Neuroscience.
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