Emotion dynamics across adulthood in everyday life: Older adults are more emotionally stable and better at regulating desires

Abstract

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.

A Study of Older Adults’ Mental Health across 33 Countries during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The impacts of COVID-19 social distancing measures and the pandemic itself may be contributing to decreased mental wellbeing [ 8 ]. While older adults are generally better at emotion regulation than younger adults [ 66 , 67 ], thought to be due to prioritizing experiences that are personally meaningful and avoiding those which are stressful, the older adult advantage disappears when the omnipresence of the stressor is largely unavoidable [ 68 ], such as in the current COVID-19 pandemic. Although one study showed that older adults in the U.S. have maintained their emotion regulation advantage through the early stages of the pandemic by measuring the frequency and intensity of positive and negative emotions relative to younger adults [ 69 ], the current study has demonstrated that the changes brought about by COVID-19 have had serious deleterious effects on the mental health of older adults worldwide.…”

Older Adults, Social Technologies, and the Coronavirus Pandemic: Challenges, Strengths, and Strategies for Support

“…Compared to younger people, older individuals are more practiced at supporting themselves in daily life (e.g., household activities), less likely to need to relocate geographically (e.g., move out from college), and less likely to be severely negatively impacted financially (most are in retirement). Older adults are also especially good at regulating their emotions (Burr et al, 2020). Taken together, these strengths suggest that older adults may be better suited to endure the unprecedented coronavirus pandemic and the new reality of social distancing than other demographics, which may allow for them to focus on digital literacy.…”

Age-related changes in gaze behaviour during social interaction: An eye-tracking study with an embodied conversational agent

“…A second objective of our study was to explore how age influenced identification abilities and gaze behaviour towards different facial expressions. We expected facial expression identification to be quite easy for both age groups, as participants were engaged in an everyday-like interaction and previous studies indicated that aging is associated with improved emotional functioning and well-being in daily life (Burr et al, 2020; Sims et al, 2015). Interestingly, while overall participant performance exceeded 80%, our results suggest that in an interactive and engaging paradigm, age-related differences remain, with older adults identifying each facial expression more poorly than younger ones, except for joy.…”