Great uncertainty exists with whether or not old adulthood experiences an age-related decline in affective words' processing capacity. By recruiting two age groups, taking advantage of two types of affective verbs, namely, interoceptive-reaction affective verbs and the exteroceptive-reaction affective verbs, and by manipulating the factor of affective valence, based on a valence judgment task, the present study made a meticulous scrutiny of this issue. It was found that older adults did undergo an age-related decline in processing affective words. The factor affective valence did have a role in modulating the aging effect.
Jiang et al. (Fri,) studied this question.