{"doi":"10.1007/s42761-024-00239-z","title":"Speaking Well and Feeling Good: Age-Related Differences in the Affective Language of Resting State Thought","abstract":"Abstract Despite the prevalence and importance of resting state thought for daily functioning and psychological well-being, it remains unclear how such thoughts differ between young and older adults. Age-related differences in the affective tone of resting state thoughts, including the affective language used to describe them, could be a novel manifestation of the positivity effect, with implications for well-being. To examine this possibility, a total of 77 young adults ( M = 24.9 years, 18–35 years) and 74 cognitively normal older adults ( M = 68.6 years, 58–83 years) spoke their thoughts freely during a think-aloud paradigm across two studies. The emotional properties of spoken words and participants’ retrospective self-reported affective experiences were computed and examined for age differences and relationships with psychological well-being. Study 1, conducted before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, revealed that older adults exhibited more diversity of positive, but not negative, affectively tinged words compared to young adults and more positive self-reported thoughts. Despite being conducted virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic, study 2 replicated many of study 1’s findings, generalizing results across samples and study contexts. In an aggregated analysis of both samples, positive diversity predicted higher well-being beyond other metrics of affective tone, and the relationship between positive diversity and well-being was not moderated by age. Considering that older adults also exhibited higher well-being, these results hint at the possibility that cognitively healthy older adults’ propensity to experience more diverse positive concepts during natural periods of restful thought may partly underlie age-related differences in well-being and reveal a novel expression of the positivity effect.","journal":"Affective Science","year":2024,"id":463317,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":6,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9482,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":971293,"name":"Eric Andrews","orcid":"0000-0001-7186-5755","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1176702,"name":"Austin M. Deffner","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":281480,"name":"Christopher Griffith","orcid":"0000-0001-7950-8074","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":328213,"name":"Matthew D Grilli","orcid":"0000-0003-0089-3243","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":277425,"name":"Jessica R. Andrews‐Hanna","orcid":"0000-0003-1769-6756","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1293479,"name":"Teodora Stoica","orcid":"0000-0003-1797-7443","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":104,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:04:28.838123Z","pmid":"39050037","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}