ArticleThe British journal of developmental psychology2026
Tearjerkers may leave some eyes dry: Emotional reactivity to film clips from adolescence to old age.
Article in The British journal of developmental psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Negative and Positive Emotion Reactivity and Regulation in Adolescents: A Multimethod Investigation of Associations With Depressive Symptoms.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2026Article
- Tearjerkers may leave some eyes dry: Emotional reactivity to film clips from adolescence to old age.The British journal of developmental psychology · 2026Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Emotional film clips are frequently used to induce emotions in age-mixed samples, but past research warrants doubt that this evokes comparable effects across age groups. We investigated age differences in target-emotion intensity and emotion specificity (the tendency to primarily respond with one target emotion rather than others), using data from a film-rating study with 5843 individual ratings. Ninety-nine persons from four age groups (adolescents; younger, middle-aged and older adults) rated their emotional responses to 66 happy, fearful, angry, sad, disgusting and neutral film clips. Crossed-random-effects models showed differential age effects across target emotions. When age differences emerged, older adults responded more intensely and adolescents responded less intensely than other age groups. Emotional specificity was lower in older adults versus younger age groups for disgusting and neutral films, but higher for happy films. We conclude that age-equivalent responding to emotional films may be rather the exception than the rule.
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