Andrew Mienaltowski

Everyday problem solving across the adult life span: solution diversity and efficacy

Everyday problem solving involves examining the solutions that individuals generate when faced with problems that take place in their everyday experiences. Problems can range from medication adherence and meal preparation to disagreeing with a physician over a recommended medical procedure or compromising with extended family members over where to host Thanksgiving dinner. Across the life span, research has demonstrated divergent patterns of change in performance based on the type of everyday problems used as well as based on the way that problem‐solving efficacy is operationally defined. Advancing age is associated with worsening performance when tasks involve single‐solution or fluency‐based definitions of effectiveness. However, when efficacy is defined in terms of the diversity of strategies used, as well as by the social and emotional impact of solution choice on the individual, performance is remarkably stable and sometimes even improves in the latter half of life. This article discusses how both of these approaches to everyday problem solving inform research on the influence that aging has on everyday functioning.

Anger management: age differences in emotional modulation of visual processing.

Although positive and negative images enhance the visual processing of young adults, recent work suggests that a life-span shift in emotion processing goals may lead older adults to avoid negative images. To examine this tendency for older adults to regulate their intake of negative emotional information, the current study investigated age-related differences in the perceptual boost received by probes appearing over facial expressions of emotion. Visually-evoked event-related potentials were recorded from the scalp over cortical regions associated with visual processing as a probe appeared over facial expressions depicting anger, sadness, happiness, or no emotion. The activity of the visual system in response to each probe was operationalized in terms of the P1 component of the event-related potentials evoked by the probe. For young adults, the visual system was more active (i.e., greater P1 amplitude) when the probes appeared over any of the emotional facial expressions. However, for older adults, the visual system displayed reduced activity when the probe appeared over angry facial expressions.

Age-related differences in emotion matching are limited to low intensity expressions

ABSTRACT Multi-label tasks confound age differences in perceptual and cognitive processes. We examined age differences in emotion perception with a technique that did not require verbal labels. Participants matched the emotion expressed by a target to two comparison stimuli, one neutral and one emotional. Angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, and sad facial expressions of varying intensity were used. Although older adults took longer to respond than younger adults, younger adults only outmatched older adults for the lowest intensity disgust and fear expressions. Some participants also completed an identity matching task in which target stimuli were matched on personal identity instead of emotion. Although irrelevant to the judgment, expressed emotion still created interference. All participants were less accurate when the apparent difference in expressive intensity of the matched stimuli was large, suggesting that salient emotion cues increased difficulty of identity matching. Age differences in emotion perception were limited to very low intensity expressions.

Impact of Peripherally Presented Emotional Expressions on Subsequent Target Detection

Emotional stimuli have the ability to capture our attention and influence how we perceive our surroundings. Previous research demonstrates that fearful facial expressions can impair the perception of elementary visual features of a subsequent visual target while simultaneously improving the perception of the targets rapidly varying temporal features. These results have been attributed to amygdalar enhancements of magnocellular visual inputs. The current study extends prior research by examining the extent to which angry and happy facial expressions enhance or inhibit the detection of a temporal or spatial gap in a Landolt circle stimulus. Participants (N = 38, ages 18-23) were presented with angry and neutral facial cues or with happy and neutral facial cues followed by a variation of a Landolt circle target. Facial cues appeared at 8 to 10 degrees away from a central fixation point in the periphery, and Landolt circle targets appeared at 4 degrees from fixation. Some participants monitored the circle target for a temporal gap (or flicker), and others monitored the circle target for a spatial gap (or absent segment). Participant perception was tracked across gap and no gap trials using a signal detection measure of discriminability. ​Overall, participants displayed an emotion-related enhancement in detecting a spatial gap in a Landolt circle target when it was proceeded by an angry cue relative to a neutral cue, and they displayed an emotion-related enhancement in detecting a timing gap in a Landolt circle target when it was proceeded by a happy cue relative to a neutral cue. These findings suggest that the impact that emotional stimuli presented in the periphery can have on subsequent target detection varies as a function of emotion and as a function of the type of perceptual judgment being performed. Consistency and inconsistency of findings with prior research will be discussed. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.