Emotion and aging: Experience, expression, and control.

Abstract

Age differences in emotional experience, expression, and control were investigated in 4 studies. A community sample of 127 African Americans and European Americans (ages 19-96 years) was used in Study 1; a community sample of 82 Chinese Americans and European Americans (ages 20-85 years) was used in Study 2; a community sample of 49 Norwegians drawn from 2 age groups (ages 20-35 years and 70+ years) was used in Study 3; and a sample of 1,080 American nuns (ages 24-101 years) was used in Study 4. Across studies, a consistent pattern of age differences emerged. Compared with younger participants, older participants reported fewer negative emotional experiences and greater emotional control. Findings regarding emotional expressivity were less consistent, but when there were age differences, older participants reported lesser expressivity. Results are interpreted in terms of increasingly competent emotion regulation across the life span. Popular stereotypes suggest that people become less emotional as they age: Out of the exuberance of abundant emotional energy in early adulthood develops the moderation of cooler rationality in middle adulthood and older age (Bromley, 1990; Cumming & Henry, 1961). Pervasive as this stereotype is, relatively little empirical attention has been paid to developmental trends in the domain of emotion beyond late childhood (Thompson, 1990). There are, however, a number of signs that a life span analysis of emotion may be fruitful. Among emotion researchers, for example, there is widespread agreement that emotional experience is inextricably intertwined with cognitive appraisals of situations (

Associations between received social support and positive and negative affect: evidence for age differences from a daily-diary study

“…Moreover, older adults in our study reported lower mean levels of NA than younger adults. This again is in line with findings on amplified emotion regulation capabilities with increasing age (Gross et al 1997).…”

Age differences in default and reward networks during processing of personally relevant information

“…Older adults also scored more highly on agreeableness, consistent with this type of positivity bias and with reports of more positive affect or mood in older relative to younger adults (Gross et al, 1997;Lawton, Kleban, Rajagopal, & Dean, 1992) and with reported age differences in personality traits (e.g., McCrae, et al, 1999;McCrae, et al, 2005).…”

Effects of day-to-day affect regulation on the pain experience of patients with rheumatoid arthritis

“…Analyses also suggested that age was associated with greater odds of regulating positive affect, and education was somewhat associated with greater odds of regulating negative affect. In general, research has suggested that competency and stability in affect regulation increases over the life span and with education level, and there is a positive association between age and maintenance of positive affect and between education and controlling negative affect (Pasini et al 1992;Gross et al 1997;Mroczek and Kolarz 1998). Thus, age may have impacted the relationship between positive affect recovery and pain by virtue of relatively older individuals having less day-to-day variability in recovering positive affect.…”