ArticleThe journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences2022
More Positive or Less Negative? Emotional Goals and Emotion Regulation Tactics in Adulthood and Old Age.
Article in The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- The role of situational factors in momentary emotion regulation tactic and acceptance use in adulthood and older age.Psychology and aging · 2026Article
- Multidimensional determinants of active and healthy aging trajectories: a position paper from the Age-It Research Program.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2025Article
- Further unpacking age-related differences in mind wandering: The roles of emotional valence and meta-awareness.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation strategy use and effectiveness across adulthood: The role of interaction partner age.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2025Article
- Momentary savoring in daily life in an adult life-span sample.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2025Article
- The relationship between frailty in older adults and anxiety and depression in china: propensity score matching and network analysis.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Emotion Regulation Tactics: A Key to Understanding Age (and Other Between- and Within-Person) Differences in Emotion Regulation Preference and Effectiveness.Emotion review : journal of the International Society for Research on Emotion · 2024Article
- Emotion Regulation Convoys: Individual and Age Differences in the Hierarchical Configuration of Emotion Regulation Behaviors in Everyday Life.Affective science · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesDespite 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.
methodsAn 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.
resultsGoal 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.
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