人隨著年紀增長，對同樣事物的感官或反應會一成不變嗎? 思考以下問題: “裝著一半水的杯子，你認為是還有半杯水或只剩半杯水?” 老年人會跟年輕人一樣傾向認為只剩半杯水嗎? 本論文主要在研究當老年人和年輕人在遇到這類問題時，其觀點有何不同。

一般人隨著年紀的增長或是越有限的時間狀況下，傾向做出越正向或滿足自己情緒的決定，即所謂老化正向效果。 過去研究的實驗材料之情緒向度(正性或負性或中性的刺激)皆由實驗者而非受試者自己決定。 此外，受試者都被直接告知用他們的情緒去做判斷，這會使受試者去猜測實驗者的目的而產生實驗者的期望效果。 本論文使用中文中性字(抽象中性字及對比字)來塑造中性的實驗情境來檢驗老化正向效果，運用推拉的自動化評價方式(實驗三)來檢驗來自於問卷評價(實驗一)的結果是否一致。 並檢查老年人與年輕人在中性字的聯想過程有何不同(實驗二)。

本研究結果支持社會情緒選擇理論解釋老化正向效果的部份，比起年輕人，老年人傾向對中性字產生較多的正向評價，作出較多親近自己的判斷而非推離，並產生較多的正向聯想。這隱含著人們隨著年紀越大，傾向於用正向的態度去面對事情。

As we grow older, do we continue to perceive the same object or react to the same situation in the same manner? Consider the proverbial question: "Is the glass half empty or half full?” Do young people tend to see it as half empty, while old people see it as half full? This thesis investigates whether older and younger adults take the same point of view when confronted with such a question.

The observation that people tend to become more motivated to react in a more positive way toward events as they become older is called the age-related positivity effect. Previous studies demonstrating this effect mostly employed paradigms in which stimulus valence was determined by the experimenters instead of by the subjects. Moreover, subjects were often explicitly told to judge stimuli by their emotional valence. This could create an experimenter demand effect as subjects could guess at the purpose of the experiment. In this thesis, I conducted experiments using Chinese words (regular words and antonyms) with neutral affective connotations--this is a neutral stimuli only paradigm--and made use of approach and avoidance in the automatic evaluation paradigm to validate results obtained from rating responses. A word association experiment was also conducted to examine age differences in affective association.

Findings of this thesis work provide further empirical evidence supporting the theory of socioemotional selectivity in its account of the age-related positivity effect. In comparison with younger adults, older adults were more likely to regard neutral words as positive, bring them closer instead of pushing them further away, and produce positive affective association. The implication is that we orient toward looking on the bright side of things as we age.

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