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Objectives 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. Methods 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. Results 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. Discussion 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.

Background and Objectives Despite well-documented cognitive and physical declines with age, older adults tend to report higher emotional well-being than younger adults, even during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. To understand this paradox, as well as investigate the effects of specific historical contexts, the current study examined age differences in emotion regulation related to the events of 2020 in the United States. We predicted that, due to older adults’ theorized greater prioritization of hedonic goals and avoidance of arousal, older adults would report more positivity-upregulation and acceptance tactics than younger adults. Research Design and Methods Eighty-one younger adults (aged 18–25) and 85 older adults (age 55+) completed a retrospective survey on their emotion regulation tactic usage for 3 specific events: the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, the killing of George Floyd, and the presidential election. Results Older adults tended to rely most on acceptance-focused tactics, while younger adults tended to rely on a more even variety of tactics. However, age differences in tactic preferences varied by event, possibly due to younger adults’ greater emotion regulation flexibility. Discussion and Implications Older adults’ higher emotional well-being may not be primarily a result of age differences in positivity-related emotion regulation tactics but more about differences in acceptance use.

Objectives Age shifts in emotion regulation may be rooted in beliefs about different strategies. We test whether there are age differences in the beliefs people hold about specific emotion regulation strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation and whether profiles of emotion beliefs vary by age. Method An adult life-span sample (N = 557) sorted 13 emotion regulation strategies either by (a) how effective the strategies would be or (b) how likely they would be to use them, in 15 negative emotion-eliciting situations. Results Younger adults ranked attentional and cognitive distraction more effective than older adults, and preferred avoidance, distraction, and rumination more (and attentional deployment less) than middle-aged and older adults. Latent profile analysis on preferences identified three distinct strategy profiles: Classically adaptive regulators preferred a variety of strategies; situation modifiers showed strong preferences for changing situations; a small percentage of people preferred avoidance and rumination. Middle-aged and older adults were more likely than younger adults to be classically adaptive regulators (as opposed to situation modifiers or avoiders/ruminators). Discussion These findings provide insight into the reasons people of different ages may select and implement different emotion regulation strategies, which may influence their emotional well-being.

Objectives Despite a proliferation of research in interpersonal perception and aging, no research has identified the nature of the social and emotional perceptions made by aging individuals in everyday life. In this study, we aimed to identify the social ecological features that characterize everyday interpersonal perception across the adult lifespan. Method Three studies were conducted. Study 1 identified and compared the targets and locations of young, middle-age, and older adults’ everyday interpersonal perceptions; these perceptions were categorized into types in Study 2. Study 3 applied these categorizations to identify and compare the social ecology surrounding aging individuals’ interpersonal perceptions. Results Everyday interpersonal perceptions were directed toward familiar others and occurred in familiar locations, although the specific familiar targets and locations sometimes varied significantly with age. However, the types of perceptions made in everyday life did not vary significantly between age groups. Discussion Aging individuals make similar types of interpersonal judgments, but the targets and locations of these judgments may change with age. Future studies on interpersonal perception and aging will need to account for these features of the aging individual’s social ecology to provide an accurate assessment of the aging process.

Self-reported emotional well-being tends to increase with age (Charles & Carstensen, 2007), but evidence for age differences in emotion regulation strategies is mixed (Livingstone & Isaacowitz, 2019), and the strategy of acceptance, in particular, is relatively understudied. Acceptance involves the deliberate decision to not alter a situation or one’s emotional response to it, and older adults report greater use of general acceptance (Shallcross, Ford, Floerke, & Mauss, 2013). Yet, no current scale distinguishes between situational and emotional acceptance; general acceptance is typically measured using a subscale of the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills (KIMS; Baer, Smith, & Allen, 2004), which assesses judgments of emotions and thoughts. Therefore, a 6-item measure of situational acceptance was developed and administered to 24 younger adults (age 18-25) and 30 older adults (age 55+) on Amazon Mechanical Turk, along with the KIMS accepting subscale and Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS; Brown & Ryan, 2003). The situational acceptance scale achieved good reliability (α=.721) and significantly correlated with the MAAS (r= .301, p=.027) and KIMS (r= .466, p

Older adults attend to more positive than negative content compared to younger adults; this “age-related positivity” effect is often thought of as a way older adults may be regulating their moods. However, attentional disengagement abilities decline with age, which may make positive looking more challenging for older adults in some cases. To evaluate links between early attentional processes and affect, 48 younger adult and 49 older adult participants reported levels of positive and negative affect on the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) and completed a spatial cueing task evaluating attentional orienting and disengagement from emotional stimuli. Participants were tasked with responding to the location of a spatial target after seeing a cue (emotional image) that either appeared on the same (orienting) or opposite (disengagement) side of the screen. Multilevel modeling analyses were conducted using age and self-reported affect from the PANAS as predictors at level-2, and trial characteristics as predictors at level-1. Positive affect (PA) was unrelated to task performance for younger adults. Older adults reporting higher PA responded more slowly overall, and higher PA scores predicted similar response times to positive and negative stimuli on both trial types. Older adults reporting lower PA oriented attention more quickly to positive stimuli, but took longer to disengage from negative. These results suggest that there may be a relationship between the ability to flexibly disengage from negative content and PA for older, but not younger adults, and also highlight the importance of teasing apart specific attentional processes when evaluating positivity effects.

OBJECTIVES The literature on "image of aging" suggests that exposure to positive portrayals of old age has positive downstream consequences for older adults. This study examined whether these positive consequences might have limits, such that they occurred for portrayals of old age that were positive, but not those that were extremely positive. METHOD Younger and older adults were allowed to selectively view (Study 1) or were experimentally exposed to (Studies 2 and 3) portrayals of old age of different levels of positivity. Their attention (Study 1) and physiological responses (Study 2) toward the portrayals, as well as perception of personal aging (Study 1) and memory performance (Study 3) after the exposure, were assessed. RESULTS Findings from 3 studies suggested that older adults have a less negative perception of personal aging (Study 1) and a stronger calming physiological response (Study 2) when being exposed to portrayals of old age that were positive, but not extremely positive. Moreover, extremely positive portrayals lowered downstream memory performance (Study 3) and attracted less attention from older adults when they found these portrayals unrealistic (Study 1). DISCUSSION These findings pinpoint the conditions under which positive portrayals of old age may benefit older adults.

With increases in life expectancy, many people can expect to spend one quarter or even one third of their life in old age. Yet, although preparation for retirement has become increasingly common, preparation for old age, in areas such as housing and care, leisure activities, social relationships, finance, and death and dying, is less well understood. In this symposium, four panelists, two from Germany and two from Hong Kong, will present and discuss cross-cultural findings on preparations for old age. Although the focus is on Germany and Hong Kong, data on US and Japan will also be discussed to draw conclusions on East versus West distinctions. First, Rothermund and colleagues will discuss cultural differences in attitudes toward old age. They asked to what extent old age was perceived to be a period of rest/relaxation versus active engagement, and by whom. Then, Lang and colleagues will present cross-cultural findings on the timetables for starting and completing preparations for late life. Next, Fung and colleagues will discuss how religious belief and acceptance of death might account for cross-cultural differences in preparation for death and dying. Last but not least, Cheng will discuss how several global trends, such as financial uncertainty/pressure, new housing structures and living arrangements, and the popularity of social media, have changed the meaning of aging and preparation for old age. Finally, Dave Ekerdt will discuss the implications of these findings for the emerging field on late-life preparations, and for examining aging phenomena across diverse cultures.

This study aimed to clarify mixed findings about whether older adults have a cognitive bias toward positive and/or away from negative information (the positivity effect) by examining whether dispositional cognitive reappraisal (a disposition to reinterpret an event to lessen its negative emotional impact) could moderate this effect.Participants from 19 to 79 years old watched a video that simultaneously showed a positive and a negative image. Two layers of their emotion regulation process, attention (measured by percent fixation duration) and cognitive effort (measured by pupil dilation), toward each image were recorded. One dispositional emotion regulation strategy, dispositional cognitive reappraisal, was also assessed.In general, older age was related to less percent fixation duration but not to differential pupil dilation toward the negative image. However, among those with higher dispositional cognitive reappraisal, older age was related to smaller pupil dilation for the negative image.Findings suggest that whether the age-related positivity effect occurs depends on the matching between cognitive processes and dispositional emotion regulation strategies.

Previous research has suggested that emotion regulation improves with age. This study examined both age and individual differences in online emotion regulation after a negative mood induction. We found evidence that older adults were more likely to rapidly regulate their emotions than were younger adults. Moreover, older adults who rapidly regulated had lower trait anxiety and depressive symptoms and higher levels of optimism than their same-age peers who did not rapidly regulate. Measuring mood change over an extended time revealed that older rapid regulators still reported increased levels of positive affect over 20 min later, whereas young adult rapid regulators' moods had declined. These results highlight the importance of considering individual differences when examining age differences in online emotion regulation. Copyright 2009, Oxford University Press.

A large body of research has investigated age differences in the ability to accurately perceive emotional expressions on faces. This work has generally found consistent age-related declines in such emotion perception abilities, though it has been limited by the particular paradigm most commonly used: a participant sits in front of a computer and makes judgments about the emotion expressed on a static face. This session highlights cutting-edge methods that bring the study of aging and emotion perception into more everyday, ecological contexts. Moving away from making simple judgments about a static face may allow older adults to display more of their experience not only in making accurate emotion assessments, but also in social judgments more broadly. Talks in the session will consider to what extent computer-based emotion perception tasks lead to similar conclusions as in-person assessments about other individuals (Vicaria), the nature of more complex socioemotional judgments like personality and rapport (Castro), the cues that lead to empathic accuracy (Wieck), and the nature of emotion-oriented perception in the context of emotion regulation in couples (Rohr). Together, these talks highlight methods that can be used to give a more ecological perspective on the types of socioemotional judgments typically made by older adults, and when they are (and are not) accurate.

This study examined young, middle-age, and older adults’ accuracy in perceiving personality and rapport in young and old dyads. Participants were presented with twelve videos depicting two young adults or two old adults interacting. Perceivers were randomly assigned to one target within each dyad and asked to judge the target person’s personality traits and level of rapport. Videos varied in length (i.e., 10 secs, 20 secs, 20 secs) and location (i.e., second vs. third minute of the interaction). Results were mixed: age differences were found for the perception of some social qualities (e.g., agreeableness, satisfaction) but not others (e.g., extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, rapport). Accuracy was higher for shorter videos and videos from earlier rather than later portions of the interaction. These findings augment recent studies on social perception and aging to consider the myriad aspects of the perceptual process that may contribute to social perception accuracy across the lifespan.

Previous literature have found positivity effects in age-related cognition, such that with age, people show increased preference in processing positive stimuli relative to negative or neutral stimuli. Yet, in cross-cultural studies the findings are mixed. This study utilized eye-tracking techniques to record visual fixation towards emotional information when participants were under sadness induction or not. Younger and older participants from Hong Kong (n = 119; Young: 19 – 26 years; Old: 64 – 81 years) and US (n = 111; Young: 18 – 23 years; Old: 60 – 87 years) viewed pictures that differed in valence (positive, negative, neutral) and cultural relevance (US, Chinese culture). Results revealed that older participants in both cultures showed decreased fixation duration towards negative pictures compared to younger participants. When experimentally induced into sad mood, US older participants showed increased attention towards positive pictures whereas Hong Kong older participants did not. The findings suggest that age-related differences in attention under laboratory-induced affect may be moderated by one’s cultural background.