Linking Process and Outcome in the Study of Emotion and Aging

Abstract

Current theory and research on emotion and aging suggests that (1) older adults report more positive affective experience (more happiness) than younger adults; (2) older adults attend to and remember emotionally-valenced stimuli differently than younger adults (i.e., they show age-related positivity effects in attention and memory); and (3) the reason that older adults have more positive affective experience is because the positivity effects they display serve as emotion regulatory strategies. It is suggested that age differences in cognitive processes therefore lead to the outcome of positive affective experience. In this paper, we critically review the literature on age differences in positive affective experience and on age-related positivity effects in attention and memory. Furthermore, we question the extent to which existing evidence supports a link between age-related positivity effects and positive affective outcomes. We then provide a framework for formally testing process-outcome links that might explain affective outcomes across adulthood. It may be that older adults (and others) do sometimes use their cognition as a regulatory tool to help them feel good, but that can only be demonstrated by specifically linking cognitive processes, such as age-related positivity effects, with affective outcomes. These concepts have implications for cognition-emotion links at any age.

Older adults' attentional deployment: Differential gaze patterns for different negative mood states

“…Isaacowitz & Blanchard-Fields, 2012), this indicates that older adults' attentional deployment does not merely reflect mood, but that it may serve emotion regulation. Thus, this study replicates previous results on the link between sad mood increases and larger attentional patterns reflecting a positivity effect (e.g.…”

“…Reed et al, 2014;Urry & Gross, 2010). Given that the positivity effect in attention is thought to reflect an emotion regulation strategy, it has been proposed that it should become more pronounced under conditions where emotion regulation is needed, such as during increased negative mood (Isaacowitz & Blanchard-Fields, 2012).…”

Food for happy thought: Glucose protects age-related positivity effects under cognitive load.

“…Compared to young adults, older individuals show increased functional connectivity between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and a decrease in amygdala-hippocampal coupling during the encoding and retrieval of negative versus neutral information (Murty et al, 2009). It has been suggested that the age-related differences in the recruitment of frontal brain areas during exposure to negative stimuli indicate an emotionregulation attempt (an assumption for which there is as yet only limited evidence; see Isaacowitz & Blanchard-Fields, 2012), with the PFC being employed to minimize amygdala activation and dampen responses to negative stimuli (St. Jacques, Bessette-Symons, & Cabeza, 2009). The downregulation of negative affect appears to be more successful for material requiring elaborate processing (i.e., low-arousal stimuli; Dolcos, Katsumi, & Dixon, GLUCOSE AND POSITIVITY EFFECTS IN OLD AGE 4 2014; Kensinger, 2008) than for high-arousal stimuli, which are thought to be processed in a more automatic fashion (Kensinger, 2004).…”

Cognitive Reserve and Emotional Stimuli in Older Individuals: Level of Education Moderates the Age-Related Positivity Effect

“…Isaacowitz and Blanchard-Fields (2012) have recently cautioned against drawing parallels between age-related positivity effects and emotional regulation without specific evidence in support of a connection. Given the importance of this topic, especially in consideration of potential implications for prevention and treatment of affective disorders, further studies are warranted.…”