The theory maintains that as time horizons shrink, as they typically do with age, people become increasingly selective, investing greater resources in emotionally meaningful goals and activities.
Knowledge-related goals aim at knowledge acquisition, career planning, the development of new social relationships and other endeavors that will pay off in the future.
Evaluating old age within the framework of various biological, psychological, and sociological factors makes it easier for researchers to obtain more detailed and specific results.
Instead, older Japanese were shown to assign a greater value to positive aspects of otherwise negative experiences than younger Japanese, whereas no such effect has been observed in the U.S.[4] Studies have found that older adults are more likely than younger adults to pay more attention to positive than to negative stimuli (as assessed by the dot-probe paradigm and eye-tracking methods).
As people get older, they experience fewer negative emotions and they tend to look to the past in a positive light.
[8] There is a debate about the cross-cultural generalizability of the aging-related positivity effect, with some evidence for different types of emotional processing among Americans as compared to Japanese.
[7] Research shows an age-related reversal in the valence of information processed within the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC).
[10] Recent study by Helene Fung's group in China University in Hong Kong and Deep Longevity utilized artificial intelligence to show that people who are unhappy and lonely have accelerated biological age.