The document summarizes three competing hypotheses about how emotional processing may change with age: 1) emotional information remains equally important for younger and older adults, leading to similar detection of emotional stimuli, 2) emotional information takes on added importance for older adults, enhancing their detection, or 3) older adults focus more on positive information, showing faster detection of positive but not negative stimuli. An experiment is described that uses a visual search task to test these hypotheses by examining how quickly young and older adults can detect emotional versus neutral images.