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. In both tasks, older adults in both goal conditions demonstrated pro-hedonic emotion regulation, spending less time with negative material compared to younger adults. Younger adults in the regulate condition also engaged in pro-hedonic situation selection, but not modification. Whereas situation selection was related to affect, modification of negative material was not. This research supports more frequent pro-hedonic motivation in older age, as well as age differences in use of early-stage emotion regulation.

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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 (N ϭ 149), were prompted 5 times a day for 10 days to report on both general strategies (e.g., situation selection, cognitive change) and specific tactics. For each of the 5 strategies proposed by Gross's process model, tactics included those that introduced/increased positive aspects, avoided/decreased negative, and engaged with negative. Consistent with socioemotional selectivity theory, older adults reported less contra-hedonic motivation than younger, but this did not necessarily translate into age differences in regulation frequency or strategy use. Across the sample, strong preferences emerged for strategies intervening early in the emotional process and for tactics that introduced/increased positive aspects; a pattern that was even stronger in older adults. Middle-aged people more often avoided and reduced negative situations, whereas younger adults more often (though rarely) sought out or exacerbated negative situations. Effectiveness varied across strategies and tactics, but age differences only emerged for situation selection and reducing negative aspects of the situation (both less effective for older than younger adults). This research highlights the importance of studying how emotion regulation strategies are implemented in real life situations and suggests that age differences in emotion regulation, when they do emerge, may be more a matter of degree than of type.

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.

We report two studies 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 found older adults show relatively more positive looking, and seem to benefit more mood-wise from this looking pattern, compared to younger adults. However, these past studies have greatly constrained the stimuli participants can look at, despite real-world settings providing numerous possibilities for what to choose to look at. We therefore used mobile eye tracking to study age differences in attentional selection, as indicated by fixation patterns to stimuli of different valence freely chosen by the participant. In contrast to stationary eye tracking studies of attentional deployment, Study 1 showed that younger and older individuals generally selected similar proportions of valenced stimuli, and attentional selection had similar effects on mood across age groups. Study 2 replicated this pattern with an adult lifespan sample including middle-aged individuals. Emotion regulation-relevant attention may thus differ depending on whether stimuli are freely chosen or not.