More Positive or Less Negative? Emotional Goals and Emotion Regulation Tactics in Adulthood and Old Age

Despite declines in physical and cognitive functioning, older adults report higher levels of emotional well-being (Charles, S. T., & Carstensen, L. L. (2010). Social and emotional aging. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 383-409. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100448). Motivational accounts suggest that differences in goals lead to age-related differences in affect through differences in emotion regulation behaviors, but evidence for age differences in emotion regulation strategy use is inconsistent. Emotion regulation tactics (i.e., how a strategy is implemented) may reveal greater age differences. Specifically, this study tested whether older adults rely more on positivity-seeking or negativity-avoidance tactics and whether goals alter tactic use.

An adult lifespan sample (ages 18-90, N = 211) completed 3 different emotion regulation tasks while being assigned to 1 of 4 goal conditions: just view, information-seeking, increase-positive, or decrease-negative. Three tactics were measured-positivity-seeking, negativity-avoidance, and negativity-seeking-by comparing time spent engaging with positive, negative, and neutral stimuli.

Goal instructions only influenced tactic use and affective outcomes in some instances. Instead, younger adults tended to consistently prefer positivity-seeking tactics and older adults preferred negativity-avoidance tactics.

Older age may be characterized more by an avoidance of negativity than engagement with positivity; manipulation of goals may not modify these age-related tendencies.