Exploring the impact of age on Chinese affective verbs processing

Uncertainty remains regarding age-related changes in emotion-word processing and whether affective verbs show a smaller age-related processing disadvantage relative to neutral verbs. Younger and older adults completed a valence judgment task featuring three verb types: interoceptive-reaction affective verbs (IRAV), exteroceptive-reaction affective verbs (ERAV), and neutral epistemic control verbs. Significant main effects of age group and verb type emerged for both reaction time (RT) and accuracy. Critically, reliable age group×verb type interactions were observed in both RT and accuracy. For RT, age-related slowing was most pronounced for neutral control verbs, and this interaction persisted after adjusting for generalized age-related slowing via log-transformation and within-participant z-standardization. For accuracy, older adults showed a selective accuracy disadvantage for neutral control verbs, while younger adults maintained high accuracy across verb types. These findings indicate that age-related processing differences are modulated by verb affective category, rather than occurring uniformly across all lexical stimuli.