More Positive or Less Negative? Emotional Goals and Emotion Regulation Tactics in Adulthood and Old Age.

Objectives: Despite declines in physical and cognitive functioning, older adults report higher levels of emotional well-being (Charles, S. T., & Carstensen, L.

Age and emotion regulation in daily life: Frequency, strategies, tactics, and effectiveness.

Models of aging and emotion hypothesize age differences in emotion regulation-in frequency, use of strategies, and/or effectiveness-but research to date has been mixed. In the current experience sampling study, younger, middle-aged, and older adults ( = 149), were prompted 5 times a day for 10 days to report on both general strategies (e.g.

Age similarities and differences in spontaneous use of emotion regulation tactics across five laboratory tasks.

Theories of emotional aging have proposed that age differences in emotion regulation may partly explain why older adults report high levels of emotional well-being despite declines in other domains. The current research examined age differences and similarities in emotion regulatory tactic preferences across 5 laboratory tasks designed to measure the strategies within the process model of emotion regulation (situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation). An adult life span sample (ages 20-78, N = 225) completed tasks offering opportunities to use tactics that decrease negative, increase positive, or engage with negative aspects of the situation.

Aging and attention to self-selected emotional content: A novel application of mobile eye tracking to the study of emotion regulation in adulthood and old age.

Previous studies of attentional deployment to a single stream of experimenter-selected affective stimuli have found that compared to younger adults, older adults attend relatively more to positive and less to negative stimuli, and this can relate to better mood for them. Past studies of situation selection have yielded a contrasting picture of age similarity. In everyday life, attentional deployment is fundamentally and dynamically related to situation selection, but prior studies have investigated them only in isolation.

The roles of age and attention in general emotion regulation, reappraisal, and expressive suppression.

Life span emotional development theories propose age differences in emotion regulation tendencies and abilities. Research on age-related positivity has identified age differences in attention to emotional content, which may support emotion regulation in older age. The current research examines the roles of age and attention under various emotion regulation instructions.

Age Differences in Beliefs About Emotion Regulation Strategies.

Objectives: Age shifts in emotion regulation may be rooted in beliefs about different strategies. We test whether there are age differences in the beliefs people hold about specific emotion regulation strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation and whether profiles of emotion beliefs vary by age.

Method: An adult life-span sample (N = 557) sorted 13 emotion regulation strategies either by (a) how effective the strategies would be or (b) how likely they would be to use them, in 15 negative emotion-eliciting situations.

Aging and emotions: experience, regulation, and perception.

Whereas some theories suggest that emotion-related processes become more positive with age, recent empirical findings on affective experience, emotion regulation, and emotion perception depict a more nuanced picture. Though there is some evidence for positive age trajectories in affective experience, results are mixed for emotion regulation and largely negative for emotion perception. Thus, current findings suggest that the effects of age on emotion vary across different affective domains; age patterns are also influenced by different moderators, including contextual factors and individual differences.

Situation Selection and Modification for Emotion Regulation in Younger and Older Adults.

This research investigated age differences in use and effectiveness of situation selection and situation modification for emotion regulation. Socioemotional selectivity theory suggests stronger emotional well-being goals in older age; emotion regulation may support this goal. Younger and older adults assigned to an emotion regulation or "just view" condition first freely chose to engage with negative, neutral, or positive material (situation selection), then chose to view or skip negative and positive material (situation modification), rating affect after each experience.

Mobile eye tracking reveals little evidence for age differences in attentional selection for mood regulation.

Two studies are reported representing the first use of mobile eye tracking to study emotion regulation across adulthood. Past research on age differences in attentional deployment using stationary eye tracking has revealed older adults show relatively more positive looking and seem to benefit more moodwise from this looking pattern, compared with younger adults. However, these past studies have greatly constrained the stimuli participants can look at, despite real-world settings providing numerous possibilities for what we choose to look at.