Age differences in emotional experience over the adult life span were explored, focusing on the frequency, intensity, complexity, and consistency of emotional experience in everyday life. One hundred eighty-four people, age 18 to 94 years, participated in an experience-sampling procedure in which emotions were recorded across a 1-week period. Age was unrelated to frequency of positive emotional experience. A curvilinear relationship best characterized negative emotional experience. Negative emotions declined in frequency until approximately age 60, at which point the decline ceased. Individual factor analyses computed for each participant revealed that age was associated with more differentiated emotional experience. In addition, periods of highly positive emotional experience were more likely to endure among older people and periods of highly negative emotional experience were less stable. Findings are interpreted within the theoretical framework of socioemotional selectivity theory.

Age differences in emotional experience, expression, and control were investigated in 4 studies. A community sample of 127 African Americans and European Americans (ages 19-96 years) was used in Study 1; a community sample of 82 Chinese Americans and European Americans (ages 20-85 years) was used in Study 2; a community sample of 49 Norwegians drawn from 2 age groups (ages 20-35 years and 70+ years) was used in Study 3; and a sample of 1,080 American nuns (ages 24-101 years) was used in Study 4. Across studies, a consistent pattern of age differences emerged. Compared with younger participants, older participants reported fewer negative emotional experiences and greater emotional control. Findings regarding emotional expressivity were less consistent, but when there were age differences, older participants reported lesser expressivity. Results are interpreted in terms of increasingly competent emotion regulation across the life span. Popular stereotypes suggest that people become less emotional as they age: Out of the exuberance of abundant emotional energy in early adulthood develops the moderation of cooler rationality in middle adulthood and older age (Bromley, 1990; Cumming & Henry, 1961). Pervasive as this stereotype is, relatively little empirical attention has been paid to developmental trends in the domain of emotion beyond late childhood (Thompson, 1990). There are, however, a number of signs that a life span analysis of emotion may be fruitful. Among emotion researchers, for example, there is widespread agreement that emotional experience is inextricably intertwined with cognitive appraisals of situations (

This article is focused on the growing empirical emphasis on connections between narrative and self-development. The authors propose a process model of self-development in which storytelling is at the heart of both stability and change in the self. Specifically, we focus on how situated stories help develop and maintain the self with reciprocal impacts on enduring aspects of self, specifically self-concept and the life story. This article emphasizes the research that has shown how autobiographical stories affect the self and provides a direction for future work to maximize the potential of narrative approaches to studying processes of self-development.

This article examines conversational recounting about experiences as a potential mechanism by which people socially construct themselves and their worlds over the life span and the resulting implications for understanding adult development. Two principles governing conversational recounting of past events are proposed: coconstruction (the joint influences of speakers and contexts on conversational reconstructions of past events) and consistency (the influence of a conversational reconstruction on subsequent memory). Operating together, the principles provide an account for how autobiographical memory is socially constructed. In addition, the principles may illuminate how conversations about the past can influence the development of identity in adulthood.

In this paper, we consider how the life story develops through the creation of self-event connections in narrating experiences. We first outline the ways in which such connections have been implied by existing work on the life story, and then consider the varieties of such connections that we see in our own work. That work suggests that self-event connections can construct both a stable sense of self as well as a sense of how the self has changed across time. Moreover, different types of connections have different implications for the development of the life story. We also consider developmental and other factors which make one or another type of connection more likely. Finally, we consider two issues for future work, as well as some methodological considerations involved in testing those proposals.