Mobile eye tracking reveals little evidence for age differences in attentional selection for mood regulation

Two studies are reported representing the first use of mobile eye tracking to study emotion regulation across adulthood. Past research on age differences in attentional deployment using stationary eye tracking has revealed older adults show relatively more positive looking and seem to benefit more moodwise from this looking pattern, compared with younger adults. However, these past studies have greatly constrained the stimuli participants can look at, despite real-world settings providing numerous possibilities for what we choose to look at. The authors therefore used mobile eye tracking to study age differences in attentional selection, as indicated by fixation patterns to stimuli of different valence freely chosen by the participant. In contrast to stationary eye-tracking studies of attentional deployment, Study 1 showed that younger and older individuals generally selected similar proportions of valenced stimuli, and attentional selection had similar effects on mood across age groups. Study 2 replicated this pattern with an adult life span sample including middle-aged individuals. Emotion regulation-relevant attention may thus differ depending on whether stimuli are freely chosen or not.