Age Similarities and Differences in Spontaneous Use of Emotion Regulation Tactics Across Five Laboratory Tasks

Theories of emotional aging have proposed that age differences in emotion regulation may partly explain why older adults report high levels of emotional well-being despite declines in other domains. The current research examined age differences and similarities in emotion regulatory tactic preferences across 5 laboratory tasks designed to measure the strategies within the process model of emotion regulation (situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation). An adult life span sample (ages 20-78, N = 225) completed tasks offering opportunities to use tactics that decrease negative, increase positive, or engage with negative aspects of the situation. Overall, age similarity in tactic preferences (supported by Bayes factors) was much more common than age differences. Across the sample, participants favored avoiding negative aspects in situation selection and modification and seeking or introducing positive aspects in attentional deployment and cognitive change. Self-reports of affect suggest that older adults were more responsive to positive aspects of the situation, although they did not seek them out more than other age groups. These results cast some doubt on the assumption that spontaneous emotion regulation is more likely in older age, but rather show that both younger and older adults show similar preferences in the absence of other strong goals. This novel approach of examining strategies across the process model highlights benefits of comparing multiple tactics within strategies not only when examining possible age differences, but also when studying patterns of emotion regulation in general.