Links Between Daily Life and Laboratory Emotion Regulation Processes: The Role of Age and Cognitive Status

This study investigates how daily use of emotion regulation (ER) strategies predicts ER processes in the laboratory among young adults and cognitively diverse older adults.

Young adults (aged 21-34, n = 66), cognitively normal (CN) older adults (aged 70-83, n = 87), and older adults with researcher-defined mild cognitive impairment (MCI; aged 70-84; n = 58) completed an experience sampling procedure (7×/day for 9 days) reporting their distraction and reappraisal use in daily life. In a laboratory task inducing high-arousal negative emotion, they reported their (a) distraction and reappraisal use when instructed to reduce negative emotion and (b) ER success and perceptions when randomly assigned to regulate using distraction or reappraisal.

Among CN older adults, a higher frequency of using a strategy in daily life predicted greater success deploying the strategy when instructed to do so but was unrelated to spontaneous strategy use in the laboratory. In contrast, among older adults with researcher-defined MCI, greater daily life strategy use predicted greater laboratory use, but not greater success. Daily strategy use in younger adults was unrelated to strategy use and success in the laboratory. Older adults with researcher-defined MCI experienced ER as more demanding but did not differ from non-impaired individuals in terms of perceived ER effort.

Cognitively normal older adults may be better able to leverage their ER experience in novel contexts than younger adults. Older adults with MCI may be motivated to manage their emotions but experience more ER difficulty, perhaps in part due to reliance on default strategies.