Emotional experience improves with age: Evidence based on over 10 years of experience sampling.

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that emotional well-being improves from early adulthood to old age. This study used experience-sampling to examine the developmental course of emotional experience in a representative sample of adults spanning early to very late adulthood. Participants (N = 184, Wave 1; N = 191, Wave 2; N = 178, Wave 3) reported their emotional states at five randomly selected times each day for a one week period. Using a measurement burst design, the one-week sampling procedure was repeated five and then ten years later. Cross-sectional and growth curve analyses indicate that aging is associated with more positive overall emotional well-being, with greater emotional stability and with more complexity (as evidenced by greater co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions). These findings remained robust after accounting for other variables that may be related to emotional experience (personality, verbal fluency, physical health, and demographic variables). Finally, emotional experience predicted mortality; controlling for age, sex, and ethnicity, individuals who experienced relatively more positive than negative emotions in everyday life were more likely to have survived over a 13 year period. Findings are discussed in the theoretical context of socioemotional selectivity theory.

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

“…This suggests that more activity during social judgments in DN and RN regions may indicate a strategy for these judgments that emphasizes negative aspects, particularly in those younger adults who score low on agreeableness. In addition, this association among negative self-assessments, personality, and stronger engagement of these brain networks is interesting in light of the considerable research showing that younger adults tend to have more negative affect than older adults (e.g., Carstensen, et al, 2011;Stone, et al, 2010), and our finding that older adults have weaker activation and functional connectivity in the DN. That is, if older adults modulate their emotional responses to be more positive, in line with their motivational goals Mather & Carstensen, 2005), and activity in the DN is associated with cognitive processes leading to greater negativity, then reduced DN engagement and/or functional connectivity during social cognitive tasks may be a reflection of these goals.…”

“…That is, when a relatively small sample size is studied, that particular group of older adults may or may not have better mood, or rate themselves higher on some personality traits, and may or may not show an emotional bias on the specific tasks under study. When very large samples are studied (Stone, Schwartz, Broderick, & Deaton, 2010), or longitudinal designs are used (Carstensen et al, 2011), the trend for greater positivity in older adults is quite robust. Our results fit nicely with this idea and indicate that the positivity effect can be found with relatively simple personality trait judgments.…”

Stability and change in affective experience across the adult life span: Analyses with a national sample from Germany.

“…Many past studies interested in age and affect frequency have adopted a dimensional approach and investigated broad affective dimensions, that is, positive and negative affect (e.g., Carstensen et al, 2011;Diener & Suh, 1997). In this study, we analyzed age differences in the frequency of discrete emotions by utilizing cross-sectional and longitudinal data from a large adult life-span sample.…”

The cognitive neuroscience of ageing

“…Older adults also are more susceptible to the effects of distracting interference during cognitive tasks 11,12 and have generally slower processing speed 13 . Nevertheless, some aspects of cognition are maintained with age, such as semantic memory, or the accumulation of knowledge about the world 14,15 , and emotional regulation 16,17 . In addition, age differences in cognition are not immutable; for example, the experimental conditions under which memory is studied in older adults can be modified so that age differences are reduced or eliminated 18 .…”