Deliberate real-time mood regulation in adulthood: The importance of age, fixation and attentional functioning

Abstract

While previous research has linked executive attention to emotion regulation, the current study investigated the role of attentional alerting (i.e., efficient use of external warning cues) on younger (N = 39) and older (N = 44) adults' use of gaze to regulate their mood in real time. Participants viewed highly arousing unpleasant images while reporting their mood and were instructed to deliberately manage how they felt and to minimize the effect of those stimuli on their mood. Fixations toward the most negative areas of the images were recorded with eye tracking. We examined whether looking less at the most negative regions, compared to each individual's own tendency, was a beneficial mood regulatory strategy and how it interacted with age and alerting ability. High alerting older adults, who rely more on external cues to guide their attention, experienced a smaller decline in mood over time by activating a less-negative-looking approach (compared to their own average tendency), effectively looking away from the most negative areas of the images. More negative gaze patterns predicted better mood for younger adults, though this effect decreased over time. Alerting did not moderate gaze-mood links in younger adults. Successful mood regulation may thus depend on particular combinations of age, fixation, and attention. Keywordsaging; gaze; mood; attentional functioning Contrary to the negative stereotypes related to aging, theoretical and empirical literatures suggest that emotion regulation skills are maintained or may even be enhanced throughout adulthood. Older adults report experiencing fewer negative emotions and more positive emotions than their younger counterparts (e.g., Gross et al., 1997;Lawton, et al., 2001). They consider themselves to have effective regulatory strategies with which to control emotional experience and expression (Gross et al., 1997;Lawton, Kleban, Rajagopal, & Dean, 1992;Phillips, Henry, Hosie, & Milne, 2008;Shiota & Levenson, 2009). Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST; Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999) provides one explanation for why older adults appear to be better emotion regulators. According to SST, emotional goals become more salient as people age and they perceive their time to be more limited. As a result, older adults are motivated to pursue emotional satisfaction and Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Soo Rim Noh or Derek Isaacowitz, Department of Psychology, Brandeis University, MS062, Waltham, MA02454-9001. srn@brandeis.edu or dmi@brandeis.edu. 3 A separate model was also run to test whether between-person fixation differences predicted mood change over time. Although the mean level fixation did not predict a time-related trend in mood, there was evidence that, on average, older adults with high alerting ability who had the average tendency to fixate on less negative aspects of the stimuli, were able to maintain a higher level of overall mood than those who used a negative looking approach (i.e., BPfixation X Age Group X Alerting ...

Age differences in managing response to sadness elicitors using attentional deployment, positive reappraisal and suppression

“…Successful emotion regulation was defined as a decrease in negative experience of emotion without an increase in physiological response in the regulation condition relative to the no-regulation condition (adapted from Isaacowitz & Blanchard-Fields, 2012; Shiota & Levenson, 2009). Based on previous research, older adults were predicted to be more successful at implementing the attentional deployment condition as suggested by a decrease of negative experiences (Isaacowitz et al, 2008; Noh, Lohani, & Isaacowitz, 2011). As attentional deployment is considered to be less resource demanding (Isaacowitz & Blanchard-Fields, 2012; Sheppes & Meiran, 2008), it was predicted that older adults compared to young would not have an increased sympathetic arousal level during the attentional deployment condition relative to the no-regulation condition.…”

Mood Regulation in Real Time

“…When subjects were explicitly instructed to regulate their emotions, older adults looked less than young at the most negative parts of the images (Noh, Lohani, & Isaacowitz, 2011). …”

“…Older adults without good attentional abilities, or who did not display positive looking, showed mood declines (Isaacowitz et al, 2009). In a second study, older adults with good attentional abilities on the ANT alerting scale who activated positive looking as they were presented with extremely negative images showed less mood decline than older adults without that combination of attributes (Noh et al, 2011). While both alerting and executive control have emerged as moderators, the overall pattern has been similar regardless: positive looking helps older adults with good attentional abilities to regulate their moods, thus showing the relevance of attentional abilities to Q2.…”

“…This suggests that SST can tell part of the story about age differences in a process like positive looking patterns – these looking patterns may be age-related positivity effects consistent with the theory – but the idea that positive looking shown by older adults is just a tool for older adults to regulate their emotions may be overly simplistic. Findings that older adults sometimes display positive looking that does not lead to positive affective outcomes (Isaacowitz et al, 2009; Noh et al, 2011) suggests either that it is unsuccessful in serving a mood-regulatory purpose, or is serving some other purposes. Delineating which is true is critical for determining what conceptual models can best explain the proximal and distal causes of older adults’ real-time mood regulation.…”

Interpersonal emotion regulation in younger and older adults

“…Overall, older adults tend to utilize strategies that focus on the positive emotion within the situation and avoid the negative aspects (Noh, Lohani, & Isaacowitz, 2011;Isaacowitz & Choi, 2012;Isaacowitz & Harris, 2014). Older adults demonstrate a positive looking pattern such that they attend less to the negative parts of the situation and more to the positive (Isaacowitz et al, 2006).…”