Neural processing of emotional pictures and words: a comparison of young and older adults.

Recent findings have revealed age-related changes in neural recruitment during the processing of emotional information. The present study examined whether these age-related changes would be more pronounced for words, thought to be processed in a controlled manner versus relatively automatically processed pictures. Compared to young adults, older adults showed less amygdala activation, and more medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation, for negative than positive pictures. The opposite pattern was observed for words. Older adults showed a positivity effect in memory for words, but not for pictures, suggesting that their positivity effect may stem from age-related changes in medial PFC engagement during encoding.