Emotional reactivity to daily stressors: Does stressor pile-up within a day matter for young-old and very old adults?

Abstract

Over the past decade, many studies have reported individual differences in negative emotional reactions to daily stressful events. However, whether and how individual and age-related differences in emotional reactivity also depend on the temporal characteristics of stressors has received little attention. In this project, we focused on the temporal characteristics of stressor occurrence and examined the pile-up of stressors within a day-referring to multiple stressors encountered within a relatively narrow time window. To do so, we used data from 123 young-old (66-69 years, 47% women) and 47 very old adults (84-90 years, 60% women). Participants reported their momentary feelings and exposure to stressors six times a day over 7 consecutive days in their everyday life. Emotional reactivity to stressor pile-up over the day followed an exponential decay trajectory, with higher stressor burden in close proximity to the stressor occurrence. The exact shape of the decay trajectory differed among participants. Most importantly, both stressor pile-up and ongoing stress predicted greater emotional reactivity. We also found interaction effects of stressor pile-up and current stressor occurrence in that increases in negative affect under ongoing stress were stronger when stressors had piled-up before. No evidence was found for increased vulnerability to stressor pile-up in very old adults; rather, the impact of preceding stressors attenuated faster for individuals in this age group. The findings highlight the utility of comprehensively studying how stressor characteristics such as their pile-up within short time periods shape emotional reactivity.

Momentary subjective age is associated with perceived and physiological stress in the daily lives of old and very old adults.

“…In addition, we were able to contrast these groups which was not done in previous studies (e.g., Wettstein, Wahl, et al, 2021). Previous research with the current sample found no age differences in terms of momentary subjective age variability (Kornadt et al, 2021), and findings in terms of stress reactivity differences between old and very old participants are nuanced (Kunzmann et al, 2022; Schilling et al, 2021). In the current analyses, for those in the very old group, predictive effects of cortisol for momentary subjective age seem to be stronger, even when additionally including comorbidities, which might indicate a stronger linkage between hormonal measures of stress and feeling older for very old participants.…”

“…Thus, the EMIL sample consisted of N = 170 participants ( n = 123 older and n = 47 very old). For further description of the sample and selectivity effects, see Schilling et al (2021).…”

Good night–good day? Bidirectional links of daily sleep quality with negative affect and stress reactivity in old age.

“…All the young–old and most of the old–old participants were recruited from the ILSE study (see Sattler et al, 2017), with an additional 15 old–old participants recruited from the community via advertisements in local newspapers. As described elsewhere (Schilling et al, 2022), better cognitive test performance at the last wave of ILSE (2014–2017) was the main predictor for taking part in EMIL. The project was approved by the ethics committees of the University of Heidelberg and the German Society for Psychology (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie [DGPs]) and participants provided written informed consent.…”

“I felt so old this morning.” Short-term variations in subjective age and the role of trait subjective age: Evidence from the ILSE/EMIL ecological momentary assessment data.

“…The final sample thus consisted of n = 123 young–old participants (66–69 years old, M age = 67.19 years, 47% female) and n = 47 old–old participants (84–90 years old, M age = 86.59 years, 60 % female). For a further description of the sample and selectivity effects, see Schilling et al (2020), details about the study design, procedures, and measures obtained are reported in https://osf.io/nhzpw/?view_only=69f637430e214e168e91f888a8d24dec.…”