Most work on emotional attention in aging has focused exclusively on stimulus valence, with very few studies systematically examining how younger and older adults may differ in their attention to emotional stimuli that varies by both valence and arousal. This could be potentially important when evaluating early attentional processes, as previous work has shown that attention to positive and negative content is similar when levels of arousal are equivalent. In the current study younger (n = 48) and older (n = 49) adult participants completed a spatial cueing task in which they responded to the location of a spatial target that was preceded by an emotional image cue. Results indicated that both younger and older adults took longer to disengage attention from highly arousing image cues regardless of valence. These results demonstrate a context in which typical age-related positivity effects do not emerge, highlighting the importance of evaluating different attentional processes when studying emotional attention and taking stimulus arousal into account.

在老龄化的情感上的呵护大多数工作专注于刺激的价，除了极少数的研究系统地研究如何年轻人和老年人可以在他们的注意力不同情绪刺激，通过改变两个效价和唤醒。这在评估早期注意过程时可能很重要，因为以前的工作表明，当唤醒水平相同时，对积极和消极内容的注意是相似的。在当前的研究中，年轻 (n = 48) 和年长 (n = 49) 的成年参与者完成了一项空间提示任务，在该任务中，他们对空间目标的位置做出反应，该位置之前是情绪图像提示。结果表明，无论效价如何，年轻人和老年人都需要更长的时间才能将注意力从高度唤醒的图像线索中脱离出来。这些结果证明了一种不会出现典型的与年龄相关的积极效应的背景，突出了在研究情绪注意和考虑刺激唤醒时评估不同注意过程的重要性。