Older adults report experiencing improved emotional health, such as more intense positive affect and less intense negative affect. However, there are mixed findings on whether older adults are better at regulating emotion—a hallmark feature of emotional health—and most research is based on laboratory studies that may not capture how people regulate their emotions in everyday life. We used experience sampling to examine how multiple measures of emotional health, including mean affect, dynamic fluctuations between affective states and the ability to resist desires—a common form of emotion regulation—differ in daily life across adulthood. Participants (N = 122, ages 20-80) reported how they were feeling and responding to desire temptations for 10 days. Older adults experienced more intense positive affect, less intense negative affect and were more emotionally stable, even after controlling for individual differences in global life satisfaction. Older adults were more successful at regulating desires, even though they experienced more intense desires than younger adults. In addition, adults in general experiencing more intense affect were less successful at resisting desires. These results demonstrate how emotional experience is related to more successful desire regulation in everyday life and provide unique evidence that emotional health and regulation improve with age.

The events we experience day to day can be described in terms of their affective quality: some are rewarding, others are upsetting, and still others are inconsequential. These natural distinctions reflect an underlying representational structure used to classify the affective quality of events. In affective psychology, many experiments model this representational structure with two dimensions, using either the dimensions of valence and arousal, or alternatively, the dimensions of positivity and negativity. Using an fMRI dataset, we show that these affective dimensions are not strictly linear combinations each other, and show that it is critical that all four dimensions be used to examined the data. Our findings include (1) a gradient representation of valence anatomically organized along the fusiform gyrus, and (2) distinct subregions within bilateral amygdala tracking arousal versus negativity. Importantly, these patterns would have remained concealed had either of the prevailing 2-dimensional approaches been adopted a priori.

Previous research has identified specific brain regions associated with regulating emotion using common strategies such as expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal. However, most research focuses on a priori regions and directs participants how to regulate, which may not reflect how people naturally regulate outside the laboratory. Here, we used a data-driven approach to investigate how individual differences in distributed intrinsic functional brain connectivity predict emotion regulation tendency. Specifically, we used connectome-based predictive modeling to extract functional connections in the brain significantly related to the dispositional use of suppression and reappraisal. These edges were then used in a predictive model and cross-validated in novel participants to identify a neural signature that reflects individual differences in the tendency to suppress and reappraise emotion. We found a significant neural signature for the dispositional use of suppression, but not reappraisal. Within this whole-brain signature, the intrinsic connectivity of the default mode network was most informative of suppression tendency. In addition, the predictive performance of this model was significant in males, but not females. These findings help inform how whole-brain networks of functional connectivity characterize how people tend to regulate emotion outside the laboratory.

Singer et al. (2022) argue that the current lexical shift within autism research towards more neutral terminology hinders accurate scientific description of the wide range of autistic experiences, particularly within clinical and medical contexts. In this Letter to the Editor, we present an examination and criticism of these claims. This letter is authored and co-signed by a diverse group of autistic researchers, scholars, clinicians, and self-advocates with a wide range of clinical presentation and support needs, as well as non-autistic researchers, scholars, clinicians, and loved ones of autistic people.

Individuals with higher anxiety tend to suppress negative emotion and individuals with lower anxiety tend to cognitively reframe (reappraise) negative emotion. However, most research studying these individual differences is based on self-report, but findings are not typically validated with biomarkers such as psychophysiology. We examined how self-reported anxiety and regulation tendency influenced how individuals naturally regulated emotion. Participants viewed negative images and were instructed to reappraise, suppress or naturally engage. Electrodermal and facial electromyography signals were recorded to compute a multivariate psychophysiological profile of how participants naturally regulated. Participants with high anxiety exhibited similar profiles when naturally regulating and following instructions to suppress, suggesting they naturally suppressed more. Participants with low anxiety exhibited similar profiles when naturally regulating and following instructions to reappraise, suggesting they naturally reappraised more. Participants did not report regulating in ways that aligned to their psychophysiology, suggesting that anxiety is a better indicator of regulation style.