Differences between young and older adults spoken language production in descriptions of negative versus neutral pictures

Young and older participants produced oral picture descriptions that were analyzed to determine the impact of negative emotional content on spoken language production. An interaction was found for speech disfluencies: young adults disfluencies did not vary, whereas older adults disfluencies increased, for negative compared to neutral pictures. Young adults adopted a faster speech rate while describing negative compared to neutral pictures, but older adults did not. Reference errors were uncommon for both age groups, but occurred more during descriptions of negative than neutral pictures. Our findings indicate that negative content can be differentially disruptive to older adults spoken language production, and add to the literature on aging, emotion, and cognition by exploring effects within the domain of language production.