Mixed emotions across adulthood: when, where, and why?

•‘Mixed emotions’ refers to the simultaneous experience of more than one emotion.•The experience of mixed emotions is thought to indicate healthier outcomes.•Research on whether mixed emotional experiences increase with age is discordant.•Measuring context is vital to understanding mixed emotional experiences. Psychologists often interpret mixed emotional experiences, defined as experiencing more than one emotion over a given period of time, as indicative of greater emotional complexity and more adaptive functioning. In the present paper, we briefly review studies that have examined these experiences across adulthood. We describe how mixed emotions have been defined in the life-span literature, and how the various studies examining age differences in this phenomenon have yielded discrepant results. We then discuss future research directions that could clarify the nature of mixed emotions and their utility in adulthood, including the assessment of situational context, understanding when mixed emotions are adaptive in daily life, and determining how cognitive functioning is involved in these experiences.