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Objectives: Cognitive reappraisal is an emotion regulation strategy that involves the adaptive restructuring of one's thoughts surrounding an emotionally evocative stimulus. Previous studies have produced mixed results on how distinct reappraisal and attentional processes are, but few studies have teased apart specific reappraisal methods. This is of particular interest in aging as older adults' regulation success may vary by reappraisal type. The current study examined whether detached and positive reappraisal are associated with distinct temporal patterns of attention in a sample of older adults. Method: 29 older adult participants viewed negative IAPS images and were instructed to implement both positive and detached reappraisal while eye movements were monitored. Participants also reported on their mood before and after viewing the images. Results: Participants fixated on negative areas early on and looked at them less over time, however their attention was oriented specifically towards the most negative region during reappraisal. They also re-fixated on the negative areas of the images during the last second of viewing during detached reappraisal, and reported feeling best while using this strategy. Conclusion: These findings provide information about the temporal nature of visual attention while utilizing distinct cognitive reappraisal strategies. Results highlight the importance of further teasing apart differences between detached and positive reappraisal as regulatory success and attentional shifts differ between these reappraisal types in older adulthood.

The present study investigated whether manipulating emotional goal priority within a series of divided attention tasks influenced the presence or absence of age-related positive gaze preferences. Across two experiments, participants viewed image pairs while performing an auditory version of a 3-back n-back task. In Experiment 1, four conditions were presented: full attention viewing, emotion regulation priority, n-back task priority, and equal priority. The same conditions were included for Experiment 2, with the addition of a "no priority" divided attention condition and full attention n-back condition. Both age groups demonstrated greater positive relative to negative preferences when emotion regulation goals were prioritized, in spite of the challenge presented by a secondary task in divided attention. The present findings are discussed in terms of how positive emotional processing preferences may emerge despite cognitive control constraints in old age. Implications for the role of explicit motivations for older adults' positivity preferences are discussed.

This paper examines whether younger and older employees differ in their emotional and behavioral reactions to conflicts occurring in the workplace. A total of 144 Chinese employees (Mage=40.2, SD=12.4; 53.5% females) took part in an experimental study conducted in the Psychology Laboratories. Four short videos depicting hypothetical workplace conflicts were presented to each participant in a randomized order. These video vignettes varied in the conflict context (intergenerational vs non-intergenerational) and intensity (high vs low). Results of Repeated Measures ANOVAs show significant age differences in emotional reactions (F=11.465, p=.001, partial η2=.077) and conflict strategies (F=3.432, p=.035, partial η2=.048). Compared with their younger peers, older employees reported less negative and more positive emotions in high-intensity conflicts. Age variations in conflict management were more likely in intergenerational conflicts than in non-intergeneration conflicts. Findings of this study reveal that conflict responses vary by the age of conflict partners and levels of conflict intensity.

Part 3 of this ‘How to Publish’ symposium will be a break-out session with round table discussions. Participants will include editors-in chief from the following journals: Journals of Gerontology-Series A: Medical Sciences; Journals of Gerontology-Series B: Psychological and Social Sciences; The Gerontologist, and Innovation in Aging. Participants will provide journal-specific information and answer questions related to podium presentation topics and others raised, e.g., writing strategies for specific journals, how editorial decisions are made. Representatives from Oxford University Press will also be available to discuss in greater detail strategies for assessing and maximizing the impact of published work. Attendees will be encouraged to visit as many tables as they are able to during this time.

Situation selection-choosing to enter or avoid situations based on how they will likely make you feel-is theorized to be a useful emotion regulation strategy, especially in older age (Charles, 2010; Urry & Gross, 2010). However, research on the use of situation selection for emotion regulation is limited, and the existing findings about age differences are mixed, with some studies finding age differences and others not. We investigated whether there are overall age differences in the types of emotional situations people select by conducting a "mini" meta-analysis to synthesize all existing data from a situation selection paradigm used in our lab. We also explored potential moderators of age differences in situation selection, including properties of the stimuli options and information available to participants. We did not find overall age differences in the emotional situations younger and older adults select, though age differences are larger in contexts in which emotional information is more relevant or highly arousing.

The present study examined the power of endings on risky decision making. With four experiments, the changes in the individuals’ risk-taking tendencies were examined as the end of an investment decision task approached; the role of motivational shift toward emotional satisfaction in the ending effect was also explored. As predicted, participants who knew they were working on the last round of an investment task were more risk seeking than those who did not know (i.e., ending effect, Experiment 1). Experiments 2 through 4 examined the motivational mechanism of the ending effect. The results supported the notion that the motivation to pursue an emotionally rewarding ending leads to the ending effect. The present research complements existing motivational accounts of risk taking and suggests a new research direction of integrating factors associated with time perception of an approaching ending into existing models of risky decision making.

Background Bipolar disorder is associated with heightened and persistent positive emotion (Gruber in Curr Dir Psychol Sci 20:217–221, 2011; Johnson in Clin Psychol Rev 25:241–262, 2005). Yet little is known about information processing biases that may influence these patterns of emotion responding. Methods The current study adopted eye-tracking methodology as a continuous measure of sustained overt attention to monitor gaze preferences during passive viewing of positive, negative, and neutral standardized photo stimuli among remitted bipolar adults and healthy controls. Percentage fixation durations were recorded for predetermined areas of interest across the entire image presentation, and exploratory analyses were conducted to examine early versus late temporal phases of image processing. Results Results suggest that the bipolar and healthy control groups did not differ in patterns of attention bias. Conclusions Findings provide insight into apparently intact attention processing despite disrupted emotional responding in bipolar disorder.

Life span emotional development theories propose age differences in emotion regulation tendencies and abilities. Research on age-related positivity has identified age differences in attention to emotional content, which may support emotion regulation in older age. The current research examines the roles of age and attention under various emotion regulation instructions. We measured younger (N = 92) and older (N = 88) adults' fixation to negative emotional content and continuously rated affect during normal viewing and instructions to regulate. Those instructed to regulate first did so generally, then using detached or positive reappraisal and expressive suppression. Older adults (OAs) fixated less than younger adults (YAs) in negative areas regardless of instructions, suggesting broad age-related attentional tendencies. In contrast to some previous research, between-subjects analyses showed no age differences in effects of either form of reappraisal or suppression on affect. Within-subject analyses showed specific regulation instructions predicted less negative affect than general instructions for both age groups. Attention was unrelated to affect for both YAs and OAs across instructions. In sum, this research presents pervasive attentional preferences away from negative material in OAs as well as evidence of successful reappraisal and suppression in both age groups. Looking patterns, however, seemed unrelated to emotion regulation instructions' effects on mood for either age group. Age differences in attentional patterns may therefore not translate into age differences in subsequent emotion regulation success. (PsycINFO Database Record

Situation selection is a form of activity selection focused on the affective tone of potential choices. We investigated this type of emotional activity selection in everyday life during a longitudinal multi-burst study of middle-aged and older adults. In each burst, participants were asked to complete six phone-based assessments per day across five consecutive days, including a situation selection question about what type of emotional situation they would want to engage in at the time. They also reported on various emotion regulation strategies. Both age groups favored positive activities, but older adults preferred positive-deactivated activities whereas middle-aged adults favored positive-activated activities. Both middle-aged and older adults reported more attention towards positive relative to negative thoughts. Greater attention to positive thoughts was associated with the tendency to select more positive activities across age groups. Both age and emotion regulation strategy use may therefore contribute to choice of emotional activities in everyday life.

One big push in open science is to change journal practices to encourage a more transparent and replicable scientific record. I will start by considering why these issues are important from the perspective of a journal editor. The Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines were developed as a modular way for journals to encourage and/or require certain practices by authors before submitting. I will describe the TOP guidelines and will recount my experience in working to bring the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences to Level 1 of the TOP guidelines. Despite the challenges involved in changing journal practices to encourage and/or mandate greater use of open science practices, these changes will likely be coming to more journals in gerontology and beyond in the coming years, making it important for authors to be aware of changes in expectations and practices.

Two studies are reported representing the first use of mobile eye tracking to study emotion regulation across adulthood. Past research on age differences in attentional deployment using stationary eye tracking has revealed older adults show relatively more positive looking and seem to benefit more moodwise from this looking pattern, compared with younger adults. However, these past studies have greatly constrained the stimuli participants can look at, despite real-world settings providing numerous possibilities for what we choose to look at. The authors therefore used mobile eye tracking to study age differences in attentional selection, as indicated by fixation patterns to stimuli of different valence freely chosen by the participant. In contrast to stationary eye-tracking studies of attentional deployment, Study 1 showed that younger and older individuals generally selected similar proportions of valenced stimuli, and attentional selection had similar effects on mood across age groups. Study 2 replicated this pattern with an adult life span sample including middle-aged individuals. Emotion regulation-relevant attention may thus differ depending on whether stimuli are freely chosen or not. (PsycINFO Database Record

Although context is crucial to emotion perception, there are various factors that can modulate contextual influence. The current research investigated how cue type, top-down control, and the perceiver's age influence attention to context in facial emotion perception. In 2 experiments, younger and older adults identified facial expressions contextualized by other faces, isolated objects, and scenes. In the first experiment, participants were instructed to ignore face, object, and scene contexts. Face context was found to influence perception the least, whereas scene context produced the most contextual effect. Older adults were more influenced by context than younger adults, but both age groups were similarly influenced by different types of contextual cues, even when they were instructed to ignore the context. In the second experiment, when explicitly instructed that the context had no meaningful relationship to the target, younger and older adults both were less influenced by context than when they were instructed that the context was relevant to the target. Results from both studies indicate that contextual influence on emotion perception is not constant, but can vary based on the type of contextual cue, cue relevance, and the perceiver's age.

Prominent life span theories of emotion propose that older adults attend less to negative emotional information and report less negative emotional reactions to the same information than younger adults do. Although parallel age differences in affective information processing and age differences in emotional reactivity have been proposed, they have rarely been investigated within the same study. In this eye-tracking study, we tested age differences in visual attention and emotional reactivity, using standardized emotionally negative stimuli. Additionally, we investigated age differences in the association between visual attention and emotional reactivity, and whether these are moderated by cognitive reappraisal. Older as compared with younger adults showed fixation patterns away from negative image content, while they reacted with greater negative emotions. The association between visual attention and emotional reactivity differed by age group and positive reappraisal. Younger adults felt better when they attended more to negative content rather than less, but this relationship only held for younger adults who did not attach a positive meaning to the negative situation. For older adults, overall, there was no significant association between visual attention and emotional reactivity. However, for older adults who did not use positive reappraisal, decreases in attention to negative information were associated with less negative emotions. The present findings point to a complex relationship between younger and older adults' visual attention and emotional reactions. (PsycINFO Database Record

In this study, 59 younger (aged from 18 to 24) and 66 older participants (aged from 58 to 84) were presented with different emotional expressions (happy, sad, and angry), and the closeness of the facial stimuli was manipulated by telling participants that the targets shared many (little) similarities with them. Participants’ values on eudaimonic (hedonic) goals and whether they regarded happiness (meaning) as important were also measured. Results revealed that regardless of valence of the facial expressions, among participants who didn’t value eudaimonic goals, older adults generally paid less attention to others’ emotions than did younger adults; however, among participants who valued eudaimonic goals, older adults did not differ from younger adults in attending to non-close others’ emotions, and even demonstrated more attention to close-others’ emotions than younger adults. These results suggested that eudaimonic goals (but not hedonic goals) motivate older adults to attend to others’ emotional expressions.

Older adults have been shown to be more biased towards context in visual attention. In emotion perception, contextual attention to incongruent context can lead to inaccurate labelling of target facial expressions. However, older adults, due to cognitive and social factors, have also been shown to display more stereotyping behaviors. If the target of emotion perception belongs to a strongly stereotyped social group, such as African American being stereotyped as being angry, older adults might rely more on stereotypes and attend less to the visual context. In this study, White younger (n = 51) and older adults (n = 51) judged facial expressions of White and Black individuals embedded in emotionally congruent and incongruent context. Contrary to initial hypotheses, older adults were influenced by context regardless of the target’s race, and were more so than younger adults, especially when the target was angry in a disgust context.

Previous studies have found that older adults attend relatively more to positive and less to negative stimuli when presented with a single stream of affective input. In everyday life, however, attentional deployment is fundamentally and dynamically related to an earlier stage of emotion regulation: situation selection. We present 2 studies using mobile eye tracking to test for age differences in selections of emotional stimuli, and attention to selected choices. Younger, middle-aged, and older individuals were induced into either a negative (Study 1) or positive (Study 2) mood. Half were instructed to specifically try to regulate their mood state before having their selections, attention, and mood recorded. A database-oriented solution was implemented to analyze fixations to positive, negative, and neutral videos once selected. Findings suggested more similarities than differences among age groups in what material was selected, how participants attended to selected material, and how their choices and attention predicted mood.

Studies of age differences in affective experience tend to report positive age trends. Studies of attentional deployment also tend to find older individuals attending more to positive and less to negative stimuli. However, everyday entertainment choices seem to vary by age more in terms of meaningfulness and value than by valence. Relatively few age differences emerge in the valence of choices made in situation selection tasks, though older adults avoid arousal. Thus, both younger and older adults actively construct mixed emotional environments.

Older adults are theorized to benefit from proactive forms of emotion regulation that allow them to avoid negative stimuli. To test this, we examined choices as a form of emotion regulation. In two studies investigating age differences, participants selected affective stimuli using a cable television interface, while choices and mood were recorded. In lab-based Study 1, older adults spent more time watching neutral channels, but younger adults spent more time watching positive ones. Older adults also watched more low-arousal content, while younger adults watched more high-arousal content. Lagged analyses revealed that younger adults’ choices were directed toward increasing positive affect and arousal. Study 2 replicated these findings in a community-based adult life span sample at a local museum. These findings suggest that arousal plays an important role in motivating emotion regulation behavior in the context of selections, and this differs by age.

The mind is selective in what it attends to in the environment. In this chapter, we describe potential implications of selective attention for emotional experience and well-being across the lifespan. We review theory and evidence examining the relationship between attention and well-being, first considering descriptive research that investigates reciprocal links between attention on the one hand, and affect and emotional well-being on the other. Using a lifespan developmental approach, we review research on attentional preferences and the use of attentional deployment in emotion regulation. Much of this work has used eye tracking to index attentional preferences and deployment. We then describe a number of training studies that suggest how attentional control can causally influence emotional well-being, and outline promising directions for future research, focusing on how age may moderate attention-emotion-well-being links.

The ability to recognize emotions from others’ nonverbal behavior (emotion recognition ability, ERA) is crucial to successful social functioning. However, currently no self-administered ERA training for non-clinical adults covering multiple sensory channels exists. We conducted four studies in a lifespan sample of participants in the laboratory and online (total N = 531) to examine the effectiveness of a short computer-based training for 14 different emotions using audiovisual clips of emotional expressions. Results showed that overall, young and middle-aged participants that had received the training scored significantly higher on facial, vocal, and audiovisual emotion recognition than the control groups. The training effect for audiovisual ERA persisted over 4 weeks. In older adults (59–90 years), however, the training had no effect. The new, brief training could be useful in applied settings such as professional training, at least for younger and middle-aged adults. In older adults, improving ERA might require a longer and more interactive intervention.

Discovering users’ behavior via eye-tracking data analysis is a common task that has important implications in many domains including marketing, design, behavior study, and psychology. In our project, we are interested in analyzing eye-tracking data to investigate differences between age groups in emotion regulation using visual attention. To achieve this goal, we adopted a general-purposed interactive visualization method, namely Glyph, to conduct temporal analysis on participants’ fixation data. Glyph facilitates comparison of abstract data sequences to understand group and individual patterns. In this article, we show how a visualization system adopting the Glyph method can be constructed, allowing us to understand how users shift their fixations and dwelling given different stimuli, and how different user groups differ in terms of these temporal eye-tracking patterns. The discussion demonstrates the utility of Glyph not only for the purpose of our project, but also for other eye-tracking data analyses that require exploration within the space of temporal patterns.

AIM Many previous studies have investigated older adults' attentional preference toward different emotions. Interdependent self-construal is identified to be an important moderator of this phenomenon. However, despite the important social functions of emotions, the social consequence of older adults' emotional preferences in attention have not yet been examined. The current study tested how older adults' attentional preferences assessed in the laboratory influenced changes in their real-life social network, and how interdependent self-construal moderated this effect. METHODS A total of 45 older adults aged 60-84 years participated in an eye-tracking session that measured their attentional preference to emotional faces versus neutral faces. After that, participants completed the Self-Construal Scale. Participants' social network was then assessed by the Social Convoy Questionnaire twice over a 2-year period. RESULTS Interdependent self-construal significantly moderated the effect of attention to angry and sad faces on older adults' real-life social network changes. For older adults with a higher level of interdependent self-construal, more attention toward negative emotions was related to longitudinal decreases in the number of their emotionally close social partners. CONCLUSIONS The present study shows the important role of attentional preferences in older adults' social network maintenance. It identified a real-life macro level social outcome of a micro level laboratory phenomenon, which can be an important direction for future research.

Identifying social gaffes is important for maintaining relationships. Older adults are less able than young to discriminate between socially appropriate and inappropriate behavior in video clips. One open question is how these social appropriateness ratings relate to potential age differences in the perception of what is actually funny or not. In the present study, young, middle-aged, and older adults were equally able to discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate social behavior in a diverse set of clips relevant to both age groups. However, young and middle-aged adults rated the gaffe clips as funnier than control clips and young adults smiled more during the inappropriate clips than the control clips. Older adults did not show this pattern, suggesting that they did not find the inappropriate clips funny. Additionally, young adults endorsed a more aggressive humor style than middle-aged and older adults and aggressive humor style endorsement mediated age differences in social appropriateness ratings. Results are discussed in terms of possible mechanisms such as cohort differences in humor and developmental prioritization of certain humor styles, as well as the importance of investigating age differences in both abilities and preferences.

The present study aims at examining culture differences in holistic thinking across younger and older adults. Ninety-four participants from Hong Kong, China and ninety participants from Boston, USA were assessed on two measures of holistic thinking: (1) a self-reported dialectical self scale; and (2) the framed line task. Although both measures showed significant culture effects, distinct age × culture patterns emerged, such that (1) in the self-reported dialectical self scale, older adults from both cultures tended to think less holistically, (2) however, for the framed line task, Chinese sample tended to show age-related changes, but the American sample did not. Findings address the controversy on whether cultures differ in age-related holistic thinking, and further suggested that measures that supposedly all measure the same concept (i.e., holistic thinking) might indeed be measuring very distinct constructs.

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.

Cooper, Balsis, and Oltmanns (2014) present evidence that older adults view changes in their own levels of personality disorders, but that their informants do not report such positive changes. In this commentary, the author considers these provocative findings in light of current theory and research from socioemotional aging on emotion-cognition links and how they might vary as a function of age.

Scientists from many disciplines have recently suggested changes in research practices, with the goal of ensuring greater scientific integrity. Some suggestions have focused on reducing researcher degrees of freedom to extract significant findings from exploratory analyses, whereas others concern how best to power studies and analyze results. Yet others involve ensuring that other interested researchers can easily access study materials, code, and data, to help with re-analysis and/or replication. These changes are moving targets, with discussions and suggested practices ongoing. However, aging researchers have not yet been major participants in these discussions, and aging journals are just starting to consider open science policies. This symposium, sponsored by the GSA Publications Committee, will highlight transparency and open science practices that seem most relevant to aging researchers, discuss potential challenges to implementing them as well as reasons for doing so, and will consider how aging journals may implement these practices. Open science practices to be considered include: preregistration, open data, open materials and code, sample size justification and analytic tools for considering null effects. Presenters from a range of areas of aging research (lab, secondary data, qualitative) will show examples of open science practices in their work and will discuss concerns about, and challenges of, implementing them. Then, editorial team members will discuss the implications of these changes for aging journals. Finally, discussant Jon King will give NIA’s perspective on the importance of encouraging open science practices in the aging field.

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.

The current study examined the effects of age and control beliefs on the use of situation selection. Younger and older adults spent 15 minutes in a room containing multiple affective streams that varied in emotional valence, and were given free choice to engage with whatever they wanted. No significant main effect of age emerged on the number of choices of, or time spent with, material of each valence. However, age and beliefs interacted such that older adults with strong emotion regulation self-efficacy and general control beliefs chose fewer negative stimuli, whereas younger adults with strong beliefs chose more negative stimuli. Results are discussed from aging and individual differences perspectives.

Eye tracking work suggests that there are cultural differences in how Easterners and Westerners scan an emotional expression (Jack, Blais, Scheepers, Schyns, & Caldara, 2009). Recent work by Masuda and colleagues (Masuda et al., 2008) suggests that cultural differences in attentional patterns to contextual elements also influence emotion recognition: Japanese participants’ intensity ratings varied according to the emotional expression of surrounding faces, while Westerners’ intensity ratings did not. Attentional patterns consistent with these cultural differences were confirmed with eye tracking and recognition memory. These findings may be a reflection of cultural differences in worldview, termed the social orientation hypothesis (see Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001 for reviews; Varnum, Grossmann, Kitayama, & Nisbett, 2010). Differences in worldview may relate to attention: European Americans, coming from a more individualist culture, tend to exhibit an analytic pattern of attention and interpret objects in a scene by their defining attributes, while East Asians, coming from a more collectivist culture, tend toward a holistic pattern of attention and perceive objects in terms of their relationships to other objects (e.g., Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). In emotion recognition research this may be best reflected in differences in the purposes for which members of each culture attend to contextual information. Several studies suggest that Americans do use contextual information when making emotion judgments (Aviezer et al., 2008; Barrett & Kensinger, 2010). Instead of an “attend to context vs. ignore context” dichotomy, an investigation of cultural differences in how context is used in emotion perception may be more informative. In the present study we aimed to do just that by asking participants from different cultures to identify the emotion expressed by a target face surrounded by contextual faces of a different emotion. We sought to identify how context, defined as these surrounding facial expressions, was used to make emotion judgments by recording eye movements to the target and contextual faces during the emotion recognition task. Applying the social orientation hypothesis to emotion recognition in context adds texture to the simple idea that one group considers context while the other ignores it: Emotion judgments in both cultures may be influenced by context, but cultural differences in worldview may lead to differences in how the contextual information is used.

In this article, we consider similarities and differences in emotion research on older adults and individuals with bipolar disorder (BD). Recent research and theory within both areas has focused on the importance of positive emotion, but the case of older adults is generally considered a case of “adaptive” positivity whereas BD is usually considered maladaptive positivity. We explore the paradox of the same phenomenon being labeled as adaptive in one group and yet maladaptive in another, with attention to commonalities and distinctions between these two groups. We identify only limited areas of overlap, and suggest a refinement of models of positive emotionality in the two populations.

How perspective-taking ability changes with age (i.e., whether older adults are better at understanding others' behaviors and intentions and show greater empathy to others or not) is not clear, with prior empirical findings on this phenomenon yielding mixed results. In a series of experiments, we investigated the phenomenon from a motivational perspective. Perceived closeness between participants and the experimenter (Study 1) or the target in an emotion recognition task (Study 2) was manipulated to examine whether the closeness could influence participants' performance in faux pas recognition (Study 1) and emotion recognition (Study 2). It was found that the well-documented negative age effect (i.e., older adults performed worse than younger adults in faux pas and emotion recognition tasks) was only replicated in the control condition for both tasks. When closeness was experimentally increased, older adults enhanced their performance, and they now performed at a comparable level as younger adults. Findings from the 2 experiments suggest that the reported poorer performance of older adults in perspective-taking tasks might be attributable to a lack of motivation instead of ability to perform in laboratory settings. With the presence of strong motivation, older adults have the ability to perform equally well as younger adults.

Although age-related declines in facial expression recognition are well documented, previous research has relied mostly on isolated faces devoid of context. The authors investigated the effects of context on age differences in recognition of facial emotions and in visual scanning patterns of emotional faces. While their eye movements were monitored, younger and older participants viewed facial expressions (i.e., anger, disgust) in contexts that were emotionally congruent, incongruent, or neutral to the facial expression to be identified. Both age groups had the highest recognition rates of facial expressions in the congruent context, followed by the neutral context, and recognition rates in the incongruent context were the lowest. These context effects were more pronounced for older adults. Compared to younger adults, older adults exhibited a greater benefit from congruent contextual information, regardless of facial expression. Context also influenced the pattern of visual scanning characteristics of emotional faces in a similar manner across age groups. In addition, older adults initially attended more to context overall. Our data highlight the importance of considering the role of context in understanding emotion recognition in adulthood.

This research investigated age differences in use and effectiveness of situation selection and situation modification for emotion regulation. Socioemotional selectivity theory suggests stronger emotional well-being goals in older age; emotion regulation may support this goal. Younger and older adults assigned to an emotion regulation or “just view” condition first freely chose to engage with negative, neutral, or positive material (situation selection), then chose to view or skip negative and positive material (situation modification), rating affect after each experience. In both tasks, older adults in both goal conditions demonstrated pro-hedonic emotion regulation, spending less time with negative material compared to younger adults. Younger adults in the regulate condition also engaged in pro-hedonic situation selection, but not modification. Although situation selection was related to affect, modification of negative material was not. This research supports more frequent pro-hedonic motivation in older age, as well as age differences in use of early stage emotion regulation.

Previous studies on aging and attention to emotional information found that older adults may look away from negative stimuli to regulate their moods. However, it is an open question whether older adults' tendency to look less at negative material comes at the expense of learning when negative information is also health-relevant. This study investigated how age-related changes in attention to negative but relevant information about skin cancer risk reduction influenced both subsequent health behavior and mood regulation.Younger (18-25 years of age, n = 78) and older (60-92 years of age, n = 77) adults' fixations toward videos containing negatively valenced content and risk-reduction information about skin cancer were recorded with eye-tracking. Self-reported mood ratings were measured throughout. Behavioral outcome measures (e.g., answering knowledge questions about skin cancer, choosing a sunscreen, completing a skin self-exam) assessed participants' learning of key health-relevant information, their interest in seeking additional information, and their engagement in protective behaviors.Older adults generally looked less at the negative video content, more rapidly regulated their moods, and learned fewer facts about skin cancer; yet, they engaged in a greater number of protective behaviors than did younger adults.Older adults may demonstrate an efficient looking strategy that extracts important information without disrupting their moods, and they may compensate for less learning by engaging in a greater number of protective behaviors. Younger adults may be distracted by disruptions to their mood, constraining their engagement in protective behaviors.

Even though the study of cognition–emotion links is a relatively young field, some findings seem so well-established that they are rarely questioned. For example, researchers interested in cognitio...

This study used a modification of an attentional cueing task with emotional faces as cues to examine whether emotional cues influence the efficiency of alerting and spatial orienting, and whether the effects vary with the age of the faces and/or the age of the subjects. In this task, younger and older adults responded to the location of a target (left or right) preceded by a brief emotional cue (happy, sad, or neutral faces) or by no cue. Older adults showed a larger alerting effect than younger adults and this pattern was not further moderated by the valence of cues or the age of the faces. However, the results for the orienting effects indicated both age similarities and differences as a function of age of the faces. Both age groups exhibited orienting benefits from valid cueing by neutral and positive own-age faces, and showed orienting benefits for negative other-age face cues. Older adults appeared to be differentially influenced by orienting cues compared to younger adults as suggested by the cue-va...

While previous research has linked executive attention to emotion regulation, the current study investigated the role of attentional alerting (i.e., efficient use of external warning cues) on younger (N = 39) and older (N = 44) adults’ use of gaze to regulate their mood in real time. Participants viewed highly arousing unpleasant images while reporting their mood and were instructed to deliberately manage how they felt and to minimize the effect of those stimuli on their mood. Fixations toward the most negative areas of the images were recorded with eye tracking. We examined whether looking less at the most negative regions, compared to each individual’s own tendency, was a beneficial mood regulatory strategy and how it interacted with age and alerting ability. High alerting older adults, who rely more on external cues to guide their attention, experienced a smaller decline in mood over time by activating a less-negative-looking approach (compared to their own average tendency), effectively looking away from the most negative areas of the images. More negative gaze patterns predicted better mood for younger adults, though this effect decreased over time. Alerting did not moderate gaze-mood links in younger adults. Successful mood regulation may thus depend on particular combinations of age, fixation, and attention.

In this paper, we link age differences in gaze patterns toward emotional stimuli to later mood outcomes. While one might think that looking at more positive emotional material leads to better moods, and looking at more negative material leads to worse moods, it turns out that links between emotional looking and mood depend on age as well as individual differences. Though older people can feel good by looking more at positive material, in some cases young adults actually feel better by engaging visually with the negative. These age effects are further moderated by attentional abilities. Such findings suggest that different age groups may use looking differently, and this may reflect their preferences for using distinct emotion regulatory strategies. This work also serves as a reminder that regulatory efforts are not always successful at improving mood.

As a group, older adults report positive affective lives. The extent to which there are subgroups of older adults whose moods are less positive, however, is unclear. The aim of the present study was to identify and characterize different subgroups of adults who exhibit distinct trajectories of mood-change across a relatively short time period. Seventy-nine young and 103 older adults continuously reported their moods while viewing emotional and neutral faces. Cluster analysis revealed four subgroups of mood-change trajectories. Both the most positive and the most negative subgroups included more older than younger adults (ps < .05), suggesting that not all older adults exhibit higher positive affect than young adults. Analyses of variance revealed that the most negative group exhibited slower processing speed, more state anxiety and neuroticism, and looked less at happy faces, than the other groups (ps < .05). The results are discussed from an adult developmental perspective, focusing on the increased variability of mood trajectories in the older adults and whether this is a reflection of adaptive functioning, or a potential harbinger of dysfunction.

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.

There is some debate concerning whether people selectively attend to and remember less negative relative to positive or neutral information with age. We argue that such an age-related negativity reduction effect may be attenuated among individuals who are more interdependent, as they are likely to perceive negative information as equally useful and important as positive information. In 2 studies, we tested this hypothesis by examining memory for (Study 1) and visual attention to (Study 2) emotional (positive vs. negative) stimuli among younger, middle-aged, and older Chinese participants. Findings revealed that the age-related negativity reduction effect was found to a lesser extent among older Chinese individuals who were more interdependent than among those who were less interdependent.

Two experiments examined the effectiveness of the pupillary response as a measure of cognitive load in younger and older adults. Experiment 1 measured the change in pupil size of younger and older adults while they listened to spoken digit lists that varied in length and retained them briefly for recall. In Experiment 2 changes in relative pupil size were measured while younger and older adults listened to sentences for later recall that varied in syntactic complexity and sentence length. Both age groups' pupil sizes were sensitive to the size of the memory set in Experiment 1 and sentence length in Experiment 2, with the older adults showing a larger effect of the memory load on a normalized measure of pupil size relative to the younger adults. By contrast, only the younger adults showed a difference in the pupillary response to a change in syntactic complexity, even with an adjustment for the reduced reactivity of the older pupil.