Age Differences in Regulating Negative Emotions via Attentional Deployment

Although past theoretical work has proposed age-related gains in emotion regulation, the empirical evidence is not entirely consistent. In two laboratory studies, we investigated age differences in regulating negative emotions through attentional deployment by instructing participants to direct their attention either toward negative (up-regulation) or neutral (down-regulation) pictorial content. The regulation process (visual attention) was measured via eye-tracking and the regulation outcome (emotional experience) was assessed via self-report. We tested emotional arousal and attentional functioning as factors that may affect age differences in attentional deployment. The main analyses revealed that, first, during down-regulation trials, older adults were less likely to direct their attention toward neutral stimulus content than younger adults, but did not experience greater unpleasantness than younger adults. This indicates that older adults may use attentional deployment more efficiently to decrease negative emotions than younger adults. Second, emotional arousal did not affect age differences in emotion regulation process and outcome. Third, we obtained preliminary evidence that for older but not for younger adults, low cognitive control may impair the implementation of attentional deployment. Additional findings suggested that neither younger nor older adults were able to increase unpleasantness by attending toward negative stimulus content. Together, these findings suggest multidirectional age differences in attentional deployment process and outcome and underline the importance of considering age-related vulnerabilities in predicting changes in emotion regulations across the life span.