Motives matter more with age: Adult age differences in response to sociomoral violations.

Moral judgments and emotional reactions to sociomoral violations are heavily impacted by a perpetrator's intentions and desires, which pose a threat to social harmony. Given that older adults are more motivated to maintain interpersonal harmony relative to younger adults, older adults may be more reactive to malicious desires. In three studies, we investigated adult age differences in moral judgments and emotional reactions to sociomoral violations.

Falling hard, but recovering resoundingly: Age differences in stressor reactivity and recovery.

Strength and vulnerability integration (SAVI) theory (Charles, 2010) posits that age differences in emotional experiences vary based on the distance from an emotionally eliciting event. Before and after a stressor, SAVI predicts that older age is related to motivational strivings that often result in higher levels of well-being. However, during stressor exposure, age differences are predicted to be attenuated or disappear completely.

Emotion, Aging, and Decision Making: A State of the Art Mini-Review.

Over the past few decades, interest has begun to surge in understanding the role of emotion in decision making, and more recently in studies across the adult life span. Relevant to age-related changes in decision making, theoretical perspectives in judgment and decision making draw critical distinctions between deliberative versus intuitive/affective processes, as well as integral versus incidental affect. Empirical findings demonstrate the central role of affect in various decision-related domains such as framing and risk taking.

Can emotional acceptance buffer the link between executive functioning and mental health in late life?

Emotional acceptance is thought to play an important role in protecting mental health. However, few studies have examined emotional acceptance among older adults who may experience declines in functioning, including executive functioning. The present laboratory-based study examined whether emotional acceptance and (to determine specificity) detachment and positive reappraisal moderated links between executive functioning and mental health symptoms in a sample of healthy older adults.

The psycholinguistic and affective processing of framed health messages among younger and older adults.

How health-related messages are framed can impact their effectiveness in promoting behaviors, and messages framed in terms of gains have been shown to be more effective among older adults. Recent findings have suggested that the affective response to framed messages can contribute to these effects. However, the impact of demands associated with psycholinguistic processing for different frames is not well understood.

The Appraisal Approach to Aging and Emotion: An Integrative Theoretical Framework.

To advance our understanding of how emotional experience changes across the adult life span, we propose an integrative theoretical framework: the appraisal approach to aging and emotion (AAAE). AAAE posits that (a) age-related cognitive, motivational, and physical changes fundamentally change the appraisal system in certain ways, and that (b) older adults often deploy appraisal processes in different ways relative to their younger counterparts. As such, we hypothesize that these age-related changes to the appraisal process underlie the finding that older and younger adults tend to experience different emotions.

Reactive, Agentic, Apathetic, or Challenged? Aging, Emotion, and Coping During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Background And Objectives: Advanced age is generally associated with improved emotional well-being, but the coronavirus 2019 pandemic unleashed a global stressor that gravely threatened the physical well-being and ostensibly challenged the emotional well-being of older adults disproportionately. The current study investigated differences in emotional experiences and coping strategies between younger and older adults during the pandemic, and whether these differences were accounted for by age differences in appraisal of the pandemic.

Research Design And Methods: We asked younger (n = 181) and older (n = 176) adult participants to report their stress, appraisals of the pandemic, emotions, and the ways in which they were coping with the pandemic.

Positivity helps the medicine go down: Leveraging framing and affective contexts to enhance the likelihood to take medications.

Affect can influence judgments and decision-making in multiple ways. One way is through (a) integral affect, or affect related to the choice at hand, and another way is through (b) incidental affect, or affect unrelated to the choice at hand. Research suggests integral affect influences risk-related decision-making, especially in the context of risky choice framing.

Getting to the Heart of the Matter in Later Life: The Central Role of Affect in Health Message Framing.

Background And Objectives: Adopting healthy behaviors is often influenced by message framing; gain-framed messages emphasize the benefits of engaging in a behavior, whereas loss-framed messages highlight the consequences of not engaging in a behavior. Research has begun to uncover the underlying affective pathways involved in message framing. In the current study, we examined the role of affect in message framing to encourage exercise program enrollment among older adults.

Affective forecasting: A selective relationship with working memory for emotion.

Affective forecasting (AF), the ability to predict one's future feelings, is important for decision making. We posit that AF entails the ability to maintain and evaluate an emotional feeling state, and thus requires affective working memory (AWM; Mikels & Reuter-Lorenz, 2019). To test this hypothesis, a series of studies investigated whether individual differences in AWM are related to AF ability.

Paths to positivity: the relationship of age differences in appraisals of control to emotional experience.

Evidence suggests that older adults experience greater emotional well-being compared to younger adults. Appraisal theories of emotion posit that differences in emotional experience are the result of differences in appraisal. As such, age differences in appraisal may relate to age differences in emotion.

Doing What Makes You Happy: Health Message Framing for Younger and Older Adults.

: Health-related messages, framed in terms of gains or losses, can impact decision-making differently across the adult life span. The focus of this study was on the emotional responses evoked by such framing and their relationship to perceived effectiveness, as mechanisms that may underpin how health messages impact health decisions. : A web-based study using Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform was conducted with a sample of 132 younger adults and 106 older adults.

Affective Working Memory: An Integrative Psychological Construct.

When people ruminate about an unfortunate encounter with a loved one, savor a long-sought accomplishment, or hold in mind feelings from a marvelous or regretfully tragic moment, what mental processes orchestrate these psychological phenomena? Such experiences typify how affect interacts with working memory, which we posit can occur in three primary ways: emotional experiences can modulate working memory, working memory can modulate emotional experiences, and feelings can be the mental representations maintained by working memory. We propose that this last mode constitutes distinct neuropsychological processes that support the integration of particular cognitive and affective processes: . Accumulating behavioral and neural evidence suggests that affective working memory processes maintain feelings and are partially separable from their cognitive working memory counterparts.

The sure thing: The role of integral affect in risky choice framing.

When faced with a decision, certain aspects of the decision itself shape our affective responses to choice options, which, in turn, influence our choices. These integral affective influences manifest as immediate feelings about choice options as well as the feelings that we anticipate we will feel after certain potential outcomes. We examined whether the effect of framing on risk taking can be explained through the mediating roles of immediate and anticipated affect.

Me Time, or We Time? Age Differences in Motivation for Exercise.

Background And Objectives: Increasing exercise continues to be an important health issue for both older and younger adults. Researchers have suggested several methods for increasing exercise motivation. Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) posits that people's motivation shift from future-oriented instrumental goals to present-oriented emotionally meaningful goals as we age, which provides insight into how people's motivations for exercise may differ for older versus younger adults.

Adult age differences in the interpretation of surprised facial expressions.

Research on adult age differences in the interpretation of facial expressions has yet to examine evaluations of surprised faces, which signal that an unexpected and ambiguous event has occurred in the expresser's environment. The present study examined whether older and younger adults differed in their interpretations of the affective valence of surprised faces. Specifically, we examined older and younger participants' evaluations of happy, angry, and surprised facial expressions.

Messages that matter: Age differences in affective responses to framed health messages.

Age differences in responses to framed health messages-which can influence judgments and decisions-are critical to understand yet relatively unexplored. Age-related emotional shifts toward positivity would be expected to differentially impact the affective responses of older and younger adults to framed messages. In this study, we measured the subjective and physiological affective responses of older and younger adults to gain- and loss-framed exercise promotion messages.

The interpretative lenses of older adults are not rose-colored--just less dark: Aging and the interpretation of ambiguous scenarios.

We are all faced with ambiguous situations daily that we must interpret to make sense of the world. In such situations, do you wear rose-colored glasses and fill in blanks with positives, or do you wear dark glasses and fill in blanks with negatives? In the current study, we presented 32 older and 32 younger adults with a series of ambiguous scenarios and had them continue the stories. Older adults continued the scenarios with less negativity than younger adults, as measured by negative and positive emotion word use and by the coded overall emotional valence of each interpretation.

Meta-analysis of the age-related positivity effect: age differences in preferences for positive over negative information.

In contrast to long-held axioms of old age as a time of "doom and gloom," mounting evidence indicates an age-related positivity effect in attention and memory. However, several studies report inconsistent findings that raise critical questions about the effect's reliability, robustness, and potential moderators. To address these questions, we conducted a systematic meta-analysis of 100 empirical studies of the positivity effect (N = 7,129).

Preferences for choice across adulthood: age trajectories and potential mechanisms.

Across a variety of decision domains, older adults were found to desire fewer choice options than younger adults, but the age trajectory and underlying mechanisms of these effects remain unknown. The present study examined the pattern and correlates of age differences in choice set size preferences using self-report and behavioral measures. Self-reported choice set size preferences were assessed in a large-scale survey using an adult life span sample (N = 318, ages 18-90 years).

The dark side of intuition: aging and increases in nonoptimal intuitive decisions.

When making decisions, people typically draw on two general modes of thought: intuition and reason. Age-related changes in cognition and emotion may impact these decision processes: Although older individuals experience declines in deliberative processes, they experience stability or improvement in their emotional processes. Recent research has shown that when older adults rely more on their intact emotional abilities versus their declining deliberative faculties, the quality of their decisions is significantly improved.

Letting go of the bad: deficit in maintaining negative, but not positive, emotion in bipolar disorder.

Bipolar disorder is a disorder of emotion regulation. Less is known, however, about the specific processes that foster the maintenance of such prolonged and intense emotions-particularly positive-over time in this disorder. We investigated group-related differences in the ability to maintain positive and negative emotion representations over time using a previously validated emotion working memory task (Mikels et al.

Test-retest reliability of an emotion maintenance task.

Research on working memory has suggested domain-specific components for visual, verbal, and spatial information, and more recently for emotion. Affective working memory has been proposed as the set of processes involved in the maintenance of emotions to guide behaviour. The current study examined the reliability of an emotion maintenance/affective working memory task over two experimental sessions separated by one week.