Individual differences, such as personality and age, have been shown to affect emotional processing. The personality traits of extraversion and neuroticism are associated with the experience of positive and negative affect, respectively. Age influences affect by way of improved emotion regulation skills, such that older subjects report less negative and more positive affect than younger subjects. Work by Canli and colleagues has pointed to brain systems associated with personality-emotion interactions, but the influence of age on this interaction is unknown. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the question whether personality-emotion interactions in the brain vary as a function of age. Sixteen younger (ages 18-30; 9 M, 7 F) and fifteen older (ages 70-90; 9M, 6F) subjects were scanned on a General Electric 3T Signa scanner, as they rated their emotional response to positive, neutral, and negative pictures and words. Functional whole-brain images were acquired using a gradient echo T2*-weighted spiral scan (TR=l s; TB=30 ms; flip angle=60; FOV=24 cm). Data were analyzed using SPM99 and focused on regions-of-interest associated with attentional processes. Old, but not young, subjects exhibited significant activation in attention-related regions such as the inferior parietal lobule and precuneus in response to positive stimuli. The extent of this activation was positively correlated with extraversion. These results are consistent with psychological studies by Carstensen and colleagues reporting greater positive emotionality in older, relative to younger, subjects. This work was supported by:
NIH 8816, NFFBI and the Simons Foundation.