Compared with younger adults, older adults have a relative preference to attend to and remember positive over negative information. This is known as the “positivity effect,” and researchers have typically evoked socioemotional selectivity theory to explain it. According to socioemotional selectivity theory, as people get older they begin to perceive their time left in life as more limited. These reduced time horizons prompt older adults to prioritize achieving emotional gratification and thus exhibit increased positivity in attention and recall. Although this is the most commonly cited explanation of the positivity effect, there is currently a lack of clear experimental evidence demonstrating a link between time horizons and positivity. The goal of the current research was to address this issue. In two separate experiments, we asked participants to complete a writing activity, which directed them to think of time as being either limited or expansive (Experiments 1 and 2) or did not orient them to think about time in a particular manner (Experiment 2). Participants were then shown a series of emotional pictures, which they subsequently tried to recall. Results from both studies showed that regardless of chronological age, thinking about a limited future enhanced the relative positivity of participants’ recall. Furthermore, the results of Experiment 2 showed that this effect was not driven by changes in mood. Thus, the fact that older adults’ recall is typically more positive than younger adults’ recall may index naturally shifting time horizons and goals with age.

Older men demonstrated greater engagement with highly positive emotional contexts than did younger men. Thus, age differences in emotion regulation goals when faced with intense emotional stimuli depend on the valence of the emotional stimuli.

In previous research, older adults show greater emotional benefits from distracting themselves than from reappraising an event when strategically regulating emotion. Older adults also demonstrate an attentional preference to avoid, while younger adults show a bias toward approaching negative stimuli. This suggests a possible age-related differentiation of cognitive effort across approach and avoidance of negative stimuli during emotion regulation. In this study, we tracked cognitive effort via pupil dilation during the use of distraction (avoidance) and reappraisal (approach) strategies across age. Forty-eight younger adults (M = 20.94, SD = 1.78; 19 men) and 48 older adults (M = 68.82, SD = 5.40; 15 men) viewed a slideshow of negative images and were instructed to distract, reappraise, or passively view each image. Older adults showed greater pupil dilation during reappraisal than distraction, but younger adults displayed no difference between conditions-an effect that survived when controlling for gaze patterns. Gaze findings revealed that older adults looked less within images during active emotion regulation compared with passive viewing (no difference between distraction and reappraisal), and younger adults showed no difference across strategies. Younger adults gazed less within the most emotional image areas during distraction, but this did not significantly contribute to pupil response. Our findings support that distraction is less cognitively effortful than reinterpreting negative information in later life. These findings could be explained by older adults' motivational bias to disengage from negative information because of the age-related positivity effect, or compensation for decreased working memory resources across the life span. (PsycINFO Database Record

martins and mather tend to increase in the last decade of life before the terminal year (schilling, Wahl, & Wiegering, 2013); however, when physical functioning is accounted for, negative affect is lower in late life than in midlife, even among those over age 85 (Windsor, Burns, & Byles, 2013). In this chapter, we focus on emotion regulation processes in healthy aging. although we do not discuss physical health and its impact on emotion regulation, we caution that this remains an important area for future consideration.older adults show improvements relative to younger people in well-being, as well as in outcomes related to the regulation of emotions. Mood disorders indicating emotional dysregulation such as depression (Blazer, 2003;Piazza & Charles, 2006) and anxiety (Fiske, Wetherell, & gatz, 2009) decrease in prevalence with age (Kessler et al., 2005). subclinical mood symptoms such as ruminative thinking also tend to decrease across the lifespan (sütterlin, Paap, Babic, Kübler, & vögele, 2012). thus, healthy older adults appear to manage their emotional well-being better than do younger adults. a possible mechanism for this difference may involve changes in emotion regulation brain networks.successful emotion regulation is associated with activity in lateral executive regions, as well as medial regions in younger adults (Buhle et al., 2014;Frank et al., 2014). While lateral brain structures and functions tend to decline with age, medial brain structures involved in self-related processing remain relatively intact in later life (Fjell et al., 2009;gutchess, Kensinger, Yoon & schacter, 2007;lalanne, grolleau, & Piolino, 2010). these wellmaintained medial areas of the PFC may help sustain emotion regulation function in late life despite declines in lateral PFC.In this chapter, we discuss the functional connectivity of medial selfrelated brain circuits and suggest how this network connectivity may support emotion regulation in older adults. First, we provide background on emotional outcomes and self-related processing in later life. Next, we introduce the brain circuits contributing to emotion regulation and review age-related changes within these networks. then we report connectivity changes in a network known as the default mode network (DMN)-a set of medial regions involved in internally directed or self-generated thought (andrews-hanna, smallwood, & spreng, 2014). We then compare dMN functional connectivity with attention and executive networks in older adults to connectivity in two different populations: (a) people with depression, a disorder marked by increased self-focus and negative functional outcomes; and (b) mindfulness practitioners trained to be aware of self-related processes, who generally show positive functional outcomes. on the basis of this review, we propose a model of how self-related processing and increased connectivity of the dMN with other networks may promote positive emotional outcomes in both healthy aging and mindfulness experts. throughout the chapter, we graphically describe each ...

Different emotion regulation strategies are distinctly represented in the brains of younger adults. Decreasing a reaction to a negative situation by reinterpreting it (reappraisal) relies on cognitive control regions in the prefrontal cortex, while distracting away from a stressor involves more posterior medial structures. In this study, we used Multi-Voxel pattern analyses (MVPA) to examine whether reappraisal and distraction strategies have distinct representations in the older adult brain, or whether emotion regulation strategies become more dedifferentiated in later life. MVPA better differentiated the two emotion regulation strategies for younger adults than for older adults, and revealed the greatest age-related differences in differentiation in the posterior medial cortex (PMC). Univariate analyses revealed equal PMC recruitment across strategies for older adults, but greater activity during distraction than reappraisal for younger adults. The PMC is central to self-focused processing, and thus our findings are consistent with the possibility that focusing on the self may be a default mechanism across emotion regulation strategies for older people.

Maximizing long-run gains often requires taking on some degree of risk, yet decision-makers often exhibit risk aversion (RA), rejecting risky prospects even when these have higher expected value (EV) than safer alternatives. We investigated whether explicit strategy instruction and practice can decrease prepotent RA, and whether aging impacts the efficacy of such an intervention. Participants performed a paired lottery task with options varying in risk and magnitude, both before and after practice with a similar task that encouraged maximization of EV and instruction to use this strategy in risky decisions. In both younger and older adults (OAs), strategy training reduced RA. Although RA was age-equivalent at baseline, larger training effects were observed in younger adults (YAs). These effects were not explained by risk-related (i.e., affective) interference effects or computation ability, but were consistent with a progressive, age-related neglect of the strategy across trials. Our findings suggest that strategy training can diminish RA, but that training efficacy is reduced among OAs, potentially due to goal neglect. We discuss implications for neural mechanisms that may distinguish older and YAs’ risky decision-making.

mesmos não participam do processo de avaliação pelos pares do referido manuscrito. ResumoObjetivo: Avaliar o ambiente da prática profissional em enfermagem na perspectiva de estudantes no contexto da pandemia da COVID-19.Métodos: Estudo transversal, realizado com amostra por conveniência de 43 estudantes da última série do bacharelado em Enfermagem de uma universidade federal, localizada no município de São Paulo, SP, Brasil. Variáveis de caracterização: gênero, etnia, idade, local de estágio e um questionamento se já trabalharam e/ ou realizam estágio extracurricular na área. Aplicou-se o Instrumento Practice Environment Scale -versão brasileira validada, composto de 24 itens e 5 subescalas. Os dados foram analisados com estatística descritiva e inferencial por meio dos testes: Kruskal Wallis, ANOVA, Tukey, t-student e Mann Whitney. Foi realizada a análise de regressão logística. Considerou-se como nível de significância de p<0,005.Resultados: A Subescala 3 "adequação da equipe e de recursos" foi a única que apresentou média desfavorável (53,49%). A variável "ter trabalhado e/ou realizado estágio extracurricular" mostrou-se estatisticamente significante na Subescala 2 "habilidade, liderança e suporte dos coordenadores/supervisores de enfermagem aos enfermeiros/ equipe de enfermagem" (p=0,003). Na média geral, os estudantes avaliaram o ambiente como favorável (p<0,001).Conclusão: Apesar do contexto, a maioria dos estudantes avaliaram o ambiente como favorável. A variável "ter trabalhado e/ou realizado estágio extracurricular" foi estatisticamente significativa. A capacitação das lideranças, o fortalecimento de programas de educação continuada e o envolvimento dos enfermeiros nas atividades, resoluções de problemas e comissões internas da instituição, são considerados preâmbulos para ofertar uma assistência qualificada dentro de um ambiente de prática profissional próximo do favorável.

Objetivo: avaliar a qualidade de vida de idosos hospitalizados e sua associação as variáveis sociodemográficas, econômica, tempo de internação e ter cuidador. Método: estudo transversal, no qual foram incluídos cem participantes. A coleta de dados deu-se entre setembro de 2018 e abril de 2019. Aplicou-se o 36-Item Short Form Health Survey. Utilizaram-se os testes estatísticos coeficiente de correlação de Spearman e de Mann-Whitney. Resultados: saúde mental e aspectos físicos foram, respectivamente, os domínios da qualidade de vida com maior e menor escore. Sexo masculino, empregado, sem cuidador, maior idade e renda familiar se associaram de forma positiva com qualidade de vida; e de forma negativa maior tempo de internação e ter cuidador. Conclusão: as variáveis associadas à qualidade de vida foram sexo, idade, ocupação, maior renda familiar, tempo de internação e cuidador. Os cuidados com idosos internados devem ser planejados, levando-se em consideração fatores que interferem na qualidade de vida.