Age Differences in the Context-Sensitivity of Emotion Regulation Strategies

Basic data for this project

Description

Empirical evidence suggests that affective well-being remains relatively stable across the adult lifespan. Many individuals, researchers and lay people alike, have considered this evidence surprising, given that aging is associated with an increasing number of losses in many domains. One explanation for the stable and relatively high level of affective well-being across adulthood that has been discussed in the literature is that older adults may be particularly effective at regulating negative emotions in the face of losses and other unpleasant events. Empirical evidence for this idea, however, is mixed, suggesting that older adults may only be able to implement some emotion regulation strategies more effectively than younger adults. Proceeding from this evidence, the main prediction of the proposed research project is that older adults' superior emotion regulatory expertise may not relate to implementing each and every strategy of emotion regulation more effectively than their younger counterparts, but instead to selecting those strategies that provide the best match with the affordances and constraints of the situations that require emotion regulation. Put differently, older adults' emotion regulatory attempts may be more context-sensitive than those of young adults. Evidence for this prediction would be consistent with the more general idea that an increasingly selective and context-dependent allocation of resources represents one pathway to successful aging.