ArticleEmotion (Washington, D.C.)2020
Age-related changes in emotional behavior: Evidence from a 13-year longitudinal study of long-term married couples.
Article in Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 32 citations in OpenAlex.
- Dating in Later Life: Do the Advantages of Age Depend on the Relational Context?Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2026Article
- The role of situational factors in momentary emotion regulation tactic and acceptance use in adulthood and older age.Psychology and aging · 2026Article
- Humour uncovers the wide landscape of life : From laughter to freedom.EMBO reports · 2025Article
- Masculinity, Social Connection, and Loneliness: A Contextual Behavioral Science Approach to Men's Social Relationships and Intimacy.Journal of contextual behavioral science · 2025Article
- Intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation strategy use and effectiveness across adulthood: The role of interaction partner age.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2025Article
- Unraveling the Experience of Affection Across Marital and Friendship Interactions.Affective science · 2025Article
- Is age more than a number? Accounting for adult development and aging in the study of psychoneuroimmunology, stress, and health.Comprehensive psychoneuroendocrinology · 2024Article
- Epigenetic aging studies of pair bonding in prairie voles.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Emotion Regulation in Couples Across Adulthood.Annual review of developmental psychology · 2023Article
- Attachment across the lifespan: Examining the intersection of pair bonding neurobiology and healthy aging.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Your suffering is my stressor: Proinflammatory gene expression rises with spousal distress in middle-aged and older couples.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2023Article
- Rethinking Social Relationships in Adulthood: The Differential Investment of Resources Model.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2022Article
- Physiological linkage during shared positive and shared negative emotion.Journal of personality and social psychology · 2021Article
- Emotional and Cognitive Empathy in Caregivers of Persons with Neurodegenerative Disease: Relationships with Caregiver Mental Health.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2021Article
- Linking Marital Support to Aging-Related Biomarkers: Both Age and Marital Quality Matter.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
We examined age-related changes in emotional behavior in a sample of middle-aged and older long-term married couples over a 13-year period. Data were collected at 3 waves, each occurring 5 to 6 years apart. For the present study, only couples who participated in all 3 waves were examined (n = 87). Couples were either in the middle-aged group (40-50 years old, married at least 15 years) or the older group (60-70 years old, married at least 35 years). At each wave, couples engaged in 15-min unrehearsed conversations about an area of disagreement in their marriage. Emotional behaviors during the conversation were objectively coded using the Specific Affect Coding System. Latent growth curve analyses revealed that, for both husbands and wives, negative emotional behavior (primarily belligerence, defensiveness, fear/tension, and whining) decreased and positive emotional behavior (primarily humor, enthusiasm, and validation) increased with age. Findings generalized across middle-aged and older cohorts and levels of marital satisfaction. These findings support theories that suggest that positive emotion increases and negative emotion decreases with age, expanding upon previous findings by examining objectively coded emotional behaviors longitudinally in an interpersonal context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.