ظرفیت، انگیختگی و تصویرسازی رتبه های برای 835 ویژگی فرانسوی توسط جوانان، میانسال و بالاتر: فرانسوی فهرست ارزیابی عاطفی (احساس)

Introduction and objective Attributes are used by young, middle-aged, and older adults to describe persons in everyday life. The current study asks whether attributes are perceived similarly by different age groups: for example, some attributes could be perceived as more positive or more negative in old age than in young adulthood. Method To address this question, we investigated age-related differences in emotional evaluations of French adjectives. Young, middle-aged, and older adults judged 835 French adjectives on valence, arousal, and imagery. Results Age groups agreed highly on the relative rank order but showed mean differences for a substantial number of attributes, especially for arousal and imagery ratings. Associations between dimensions differed as well between age groups: valence and arousal were negatively correlated and this correlation was stronger in older than in younger age groups. Conclusion The present study provided new evidence that the perception of emotionally toned material is affected by age. Several explanations to these age-related differences are discussed.

Attributes are often used to describe person's current states and long-term traits. For example, a person could be described as ‘comical’, ‘arrogant’, ‘sad’, or ‘handsome’. Attributes also carry an emotional connotation: an ‘arrogant’ person is generally perceived as negative whereas a ‘handsome’ person is often perceived as positive. An open question is whether such emotional connotations of persons’ attributes differ by age. Specifically, do older adults perceive an attribute as similar positive or negative as young adults do? For example, do older adults evaluate ‘punctual’ persons more positive than young adults? Is a ‘comical’ person perceived as more negative by older adults than by younger adults? Thus, the question is whether attributes change their emotional meaning across the adult lifespan.

This study aimed to examine age-related differences in valence, arousal and imagery evaluations of French attributes. The findings of the present study generalized and extended the effects reported by previous studies (Grühn and Scheibe, 2008 and Grühn and Smith, 2008), and the study provided new evidence that the perception of emotionally toned material is affected by age. In particular, valence and arousal are more negatively correlated in older adults than in middle-aged or younger adults. A surprising but strong age effect in imagery ratings also occurred: old adults rated all attributes as more easily imaginable than middle-aged or young adults. The study of age differences in perception and evaluation of attributes is particularly important with respect to the attribution and impression formation literature. There is strong empirical evidence for systematic age differences in attribution processes; for example, older adults tend to make more dispositional trait based attributions than younger adults (Blanchard-Fields et al., 1999 and Blanchard-Fields and Horhota, 2005). Age-related differences in attribution processes may thus be mediated by age differences in the perception of the material used. Future research is needed to generalize the pattern of the present findings to other settings or cultures. Few studies are available investigating discrete emotions in young adults’ ratings (Briesemeister et al., 2011). Future research would benefit from investigating age-differences and cross-cultural differences in the perception of emotional stimuli according to discrete emotions. This would provide interesting and useful information for researchers interested in discrete emotions effects on cognitive activities. Nevertheless, this study provides useful data for researchers wishing to select emotional words for aging-oriented research.