1947/02/24 by Mara Mather, Turhan Canli, Tammy English +9 · 1 citation
Engineering · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Aerospace Engineering and Control Systems #Aging and Gerontology Research #Computational Fluid Dynamics and Aerodynamics #Identity, Memory, and Therapy #Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies #Rocket and propulsion systems research
paper · doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00662.x
openalex publication_date 1947/02/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/24
As they age, adults experience less negative emotion, come to pay less attention to negative than to positive emotional stimuli, and become less likely to remember negative than positive emotional materials. This profile of findings suggests that, with age, the amygdala may show decreased reactivity to negative information while maintaining or increasing its reactivity to positive information. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess whether amygdala activation in response to positive and negative emotional pictures changes with age. Both older and younger adults showed greater activation in the amygdala for emotional than for neutral pictures; however, for older adults, seeing positive pictures led to greater amygdala activation than seeing negative pictures, whereas this was not the case for younger adults.