Within-person changes in salivary testosterone and physical characteristics of puberty predict boys' daily affect.

Recent investigations highlighted the role of within-person pubertal changes for adolescents' behavior. Yet, little is known about effects on adolescents' daily affect, particularly regarding the hormonal changes underlying physical changes during puberty. In a study with 148 boys aged 10 to 20years, we tested whether within-person physical and hormonal changes over eight months predicted everyday affect fluctuations, measured with experience sampling. As expected, greater within-person changes in testosterone (but not in dehydroepiandrosterone) were associated with higher affect fluctuations in daily life. Additionally, greater physical changes predicted higher affect fluctuations for individuals in the beginning of puberty. The findings demonstrate the relevance of physical and hormonal changes in boys' affective (in)stability.

Hormonal contraceptive use is associated with neural and affective changes in healthy young women.

Previous neuroimaging research has demonstrated that female gonadal hormones can alter the structure and function of adult women's brains. So far, we do not know how hormonal contraceptives affect female brain structure, in part because within-person longitudinal observations are lacking. Here, we compared 28 young women before and after three months of regular contraceptive intake with 28 naturally cycling women of comparable age. The goal was to explore within-person neural change in women using contraceptives. Neuroimaging, hormonal, cognitive, and affect data were collected at two time points for each participant. A voxel-wise whole-brain comparison of both groups revealed decreased gray matter volume in the left amygdala/anterior parahippocampal gyrus in women using contraceptives as compared to the control group. Resting-state functional connectivity of this region with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex changed from positive to negative connectivity following contraceptive intake whereas the opposite held for the control group. An exploratory analysis revealed that gray matter volume in the left amygdala/anterior parahippocampal gyrus was associated with positive affect at the second time point. There were no systematic differences in cognitive performance change between the groups. These findings provide initial insights into effects of hormonal contraceptives on the human brain and expand previous findings on hormone-related amygdala/hippocampal complex plasticity. The affected brain regions may be related to psychological wellbeing, underlining the importance of future studies on contraceptive-induced brain changes.

Daily affect across adulthood and into old age: Recent advances from ambulatory research.

Ambulatory research - such as daily-diary or experience sampling studies - captures experiences as they naturally occur in people's daily lives. It shows that older adults' daily affective experiences, on average, are more positive and more stable, compared to younger age groups. Recent advances in ambulatory research contribute a more refined understanding beyond the valence dimension, demonstrating that the arousal of affective experiences matters as well, and that discrete emotions, such as sadness, may be differently prevalent and adaptive in different phases of adulthood. Another recent contribution is evidence that cross-sectional adult age differences in daily affect may not map onto within-person change over time. While longitudinal improvement in daily affect is observed across young and into early middle adulthood, stability and decline in affective well-being are typical throughout late middle and older adulthood, respectively. Likewise, empirical support for the claim that emotion regulation is a prime reason for age differences in daily affect remains mixed. Older as compared to younger adults are indeed more motivated to feel better, and more confident that their affect-regulation is successful. However, there is no consistent support that older adults' daily affect-regulation strategies, effectiveness, or flexibility differ from younger age groups.

Everyday empathic accuracy in younger and older couples: do you need to see your partner to know his or her feelings?

On average, older adults are less accurate than younger adults at recognizing emotions from faces or voices. We challenge the view that such differences in emotion-recognition tasks reflect differences in empathic accuracy (the ability to infer other people's feelings): Empathic accuracy relies not only on sensory cues (e.g., emotional expressions) but also on knowledge about the target person. Using smartphone-based measures, we assessed empathic accuracy in younger and older couples' daily lives and found that younger adults' empathic accuracy was higher than older adults' empathic accuracy when their partners were visibly present. During the partners' absence, however, when judgments relied exclusively on knowledge of those partners, no age differences emerged, and performance in both age groups was still more accurate than chance. We conclude that across adulthood, sensory information and knowledge differentially support empathic accuracy. Laboratory emotion-recognition tasks may therefore underestimate older adults' empathic competencies.

Interdependencies Between Family and Friends in Daily Life: Personality Differences and Associations with Affective Well-Being Across the Lifespan.

Family and friends are central to human life and well-being. Yet, interdependencies between family and friends have scarcely been examined. How is the relative frequency of daily contact with family and friends (i.e., the friends/family-ratio) related to personality and to well-being? In an experience sampling study with 396 participants (M age= 40 years, range 14-88 years, 52% females), we studied how the friends/family-ratio in contact differed along Big Five personality trait scores and was connected to affective well-being across six daily measurements on nine days (average of 55 assessments). Most participants reported more daily contact with family than friends (i.e. they held a family orientation), but individual differences were substantial. More agreeable individuals reported a greater family orientation. More extraverted individuals reported more positive affect in the company of friends than with family. Age moderated the effect of the friends/family-ratio on positive affect. Younger adults reported less positive affect in the company of family, yet older adults reported more positive affect in the company of family, the more they were friendship oriented. We discuss how examining the friends/family-ratio extends previous knowledge on personality differences in social relationships, and how the friends/family-ratio yields promising, yet challenging, future directions in personality-relationship associations.

Valuing Negative Affect Weakens Affect-Health Linkages: Similarities and Differences Across Affect Valuation Measures.

Negative affect (NA) has been robustly linked to poorer psychological health, including greater depressive symptoms, personal burnout, and perceived stress. These associations, known as affect-health links, have been postulated by our research team to vary with different levels of negative affect valuation (NAV), such that people who evaluate NA states as more pleasant, helpful, appropriate, and/or meaningful may show weaker affect-health links. Another affect valuation construct is ideal NA, which is the degree to which people ideally want to experience NA states (i.e., desirability of affective states). The current study extends previous research by examining these two different measures of affect valuation (NAV and ideal NA) and comparing the extent to which they moderate affect-health links for psychological health and functioning. Participants from the Health and Daily Experiences (HEADE) study (N = 162 comprising of 56 younger adults and 106 older adults) completed questionnaires in a laboratory setting and ecological momentary assessments of NA 6 times a day for 7 consecutive days (i.e., trait NA). The results demonstrated that the two affect valuation constructs were distinct and showed different patterns of buffering effects. NAV attenuated the association between trait NA and depressive symptoms, personal burnout, and intolerance of uncertainty. Ideal NA attenuated affect-health links for depressive symptoms and perceived stress. These findings point to the importance of sharpening the distinctions between various affect valuation constructs to elucidate their unique contributions to attenuating affect-health links.

Emotion regulation strategies and psychological health across cultures.

Emotion regulation is important for psychological health and can be achieved by implementing various strategies. How one regulates emotions is critical for maximizing psychological health. Few studies, however, tested the psychological correlates of different emotion regulation strategies across multiple cultures. In a preregistered cross-cultural study (N = 3,960, 19 countries), conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, we assessed associations between the use of seven emotion regulation strategies (situation selection, distraction, rumination, cognitive reappraisal, acceptance, expressive suppression, and emotional support seeking) and four indices of psychological health (life satisfaction, depressive symptoms, perceived stress, and loneliness). Model comparisons based on Bayesian information criteria provided support for cultural differences in 36% of associations, with very strong support for differences in 18% of associations. Strategies that were linked to worse psychological health in individualist countries (e.g., rumination, expressive suppression) were unrelated or linked to better psychological health in collectivist countries. Cultural differences in associations with psychological health were most prominent for expressive suppression and rumination and also found for distraction and acceptance. In addition, we found evidence for cultural similarities in 46% of associations between strategies and psychological health, but none of this evidence was very strong. Cultural similarities were most prominent in associations of psychological health with emotional support seeking. These findings highlight the importance of considering the cultural context to understand how individuals from diverse backgrounds manage unpleasant emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Measuring time use in surveys - Concordance of survey and experience sampling measures.

It is still unclear to what extent time allocation retrospectively reported in questionnaires reflects people's actual behavior. Addressing this research gap, we analyze the congruence of time use information assessed through retrospective questionnaires and through experience sampling methodology. Participants completed standard survey questions on time allocation. In addition, a mobile-phone-based experience sampling technology obtained snapshots of, on average, 54 momentary activities in which respondents participated while pursuing their normal daily routines. Results indicate that the associations between standard survey questions and experience sampling methods are quite substantial for long-lasting and externally structured activities, such as paid work. In contrast, associations between survey and experience sampling methods are somewhat weaker for less externally structured, short-term and infrequent activities, such as errands, housework, and leisure. However, further research is required to elucidate which method (experience sampling method or survey questions) results in more reliable and valid measures for short-term and sporadic activities.

When and How to Regulate: Everyday Emotion-Regulation Strategy Use and Stressor Intensity.

Contextual factors shape emotion regulation (ER). The intensity of emotional stimuli may be such a contextual factor that influences the selection and moderates the effectiveness of ER strategies in reducing negative affect (NA). Prior research has shown that, on average, when emotional stimuli were more intense, distraction was selected over reappraisal (and vice versa). This pattern was previously shown to be adaptive as the preferred strategies were more efficient in the respective contexts. Here, we investigated whether stressor intensity predicted strategy use and effectiveness in similar ways in daily life. We examined five ER strategies (reappraisal, reflection, acceptance, distraction, and rumination) in relation to the intensity of everyday stressors, using two waves of experience-sampling data (N = 156). In accordance with our hypotheses, reappraisal, reflection, and acceptance were used less, and rumination was used more, when stressors were more intense. Moreover, results suggested that distraction was more effective, and rumination more detrimental the higher the stressor intensity. Against our hypotheses, distraction did not covary with stressor intensity, and there was no evidence that reappraisal, reflection, and acceptance were more effective at lower levels of stressor intensity. Instead, when examined individually, reflection and reappraisal (like distraction) were more effective at higher levels of stressor intensity. In sum, stressor intensity predicted ER selection and moderated strategy effectiveness, but the results also point to a more complex ER strategy use in daily life than in the laboratory. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00087-1.

A domain-differentiated approach to everyday emotion regulation from adolescence to older age.

Flexibly using different emotion-regulation (ER) strategies in different situational contexts, such as domains, has been argued to promote effective emotion regulation. Additionally, emotion regulation processes may change with age as narrowing time horizons shift emotion-regulation preferences. The purpose of the present study was to examine the occurrence and effectiveness of flexible emotion regulation in response to daily hassles from different domains within the age range from adolescence to old age. Participants, ranging from 14 to 88 years old (N = 325), completed an experience-sampling study of approximately 9 days over a 3-week period. At each momentary assessment, participants reported on their hassles, emotion-regulation strategies, and affect. As expected, strategy use varied across individuals and domains. For example, emotion expression and suppression were typical responses to interpersonal hassles, whereas social sharing was often used in response to work/school hassles. In situations wherein hassles included multiple life domains, participants reported the use of more emotion-regulation strategies than for single-domain hassles. Although flexible emotion regulation was evident in participants' responses to hassles, the expectation that it would be associated with lower hassle reactivity was not confirmed. These patterns were, for the most part, consistent across ages. This study contributes new insights into situational characteristics that are associated with emotion-regulation flexibility, showing that hassles domains are important for strategy selection, and that this holds from adolescence to old age. It also suggests that such defined emotion-regulation flexibility is not as strongly linked to emotion-regulation effectiveness as has been previously suggested. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

With a little help from my spouse: does spousal collaboration compensate for the effects of cognitive aging?

BACKGROUND: Collaborating with another person may help people compensate for aging-related losses in memory performance. However, collaborating in itself is effortful and draws upon individual cognitive resources. One factor that can facilitate collaboration, and decrease its resource requirements, is familiarity between interaction partners. Such facilitation should be particularly important when cognitive-mechanic resources are low. OBJECTIVE: The current study was conducted to empirically test this theoretical notion. We hypothesized that cognitive aging should amplify the advantage of collaborating with a familiar partner over collaborating with an unfamiliar person. METHODS: We developed an interpersonal cueing task based on the game Taboo©. The task modeled an everyday-life situation in which one person cues another person to retrieve a piece of information from memory. Seventy-six younger adults (20-33 years) and 80 older adults (63-79 years) worked on this task once with their spouse and once with an unfamiliar cross-sex partner from the same age group. Collaborative performance was operationalized as the number of cue words needed until the partner guessed the target, as determined by independent trained coders. Performance in the Digit Symbol Substitution Test was used as an indicator of cognitive aging. RESULTS: Multilevel-modeling analyses revealed that collaborating spouses outperformed collaborators who had not known each other before. This effect was comparable for both age groups but larger in persons with lower Digit Symbol scores. While participants with lower Digit Symbol scores generally performed worse in the collaborative task, they partly made up for this difference when working with the spouse. CONCLUSION: We conclude that spousal collaboration may offer a compensatory strategy to cope with individual aging-related losses.

Beyond "happy, angry, or sad?": age-of-poser and age-of-rater effects on multi-dimensional emotion perception.

Young, middle-aged, and older raters (N=154) evaluated 1,026 prototypical facial poses of neutrality, happiness, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness stemming from 171 young, middle-aged, and older posers. The majority of poses were rated as multi-faceted, that is, to comprise several expressions of varying intensities. Consistent with the notion of age-related increases in negativity-avoidance/positivity effects, crossed-random effects analyses showed an age-related decrease in the attributions of negative, but not positive and neutral, target expressions (that the poser intended to show), and an age-related increase in the attributions of positive and neutral, but not negative, non-target expressions (that the posers did not intend to show). Expressions were more difficult to read the older the posers, particularly for male posers. These age-of-poser effects were independent of the valence of the expression, but partly differed across age groups of raters. The study supports the idea of multi-dimensionality and age-dependency of emotion perception.

Longitudinal coupling of momentary stress reactivity and trait neuroticism: Specificity of states, traits, and age period.

Personality traits like neuroticism show both continuity and change across adolescence and adulthood, with most pronounced changes occurring in young adulthood. It has been assumed, but insufficiently examined, that trait changes occur gradually over the years through the accumulation of daily experiences. The current longitudinal measurement burst study examined (a) how changes in average momentary stress reactivity are coupled with changes in trait neuroticism, (b) the extent to which this coupling is specific to stress reactivity and neuroticism, and (c) the extent to which there are age differences in the association between changes in stress reactivity and changes in neuroticism. Participants (N = 581; 50% male) between 14 and 86 years of age completed up to 3 waves (T1-T3) of Big Five trait questionnaires and experience-sampling assessments during 6 years. During each three-week experience-sampling period, participants reported their momentary affect and occurrences of hassles on average 55 times. Latent change models showed that increases over time in affective reactivity to daily hassles were associated with increases in neuroticism. This effect was consistent from T1 to T2 as well as from T2 to T3, and most pronounced in young adulthood. Importantly, the results were specific to associations between stress reactivity and neuroticism because changes in frequency of hassles in daily life did not predict changes in neuroticism, and stress reactivity did not consistently predict changes in the other Big Five traits. The findings help to inform theoretical models that outline how short-term states might contribute to gradual longer-term changes in traits like neuroticism. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The 'I know you' and the 'you know me' of mutual goal knowledge in partnerships: differential associations with partnership satisfaction and sense of closeness over time.

Personal goals, that is, ideas of what one wants to maintain, attain, or avoid in the future, are pursued within social contexts and may influence the social systems a person belongs to. Focusing on romantic partnerships as one of the most important social contexts in adulthood, this longitudinal study investigated the role of partners' mutual goal knowledge for partnership development (T1: N=69 couples; T2: N=47). Partners described their own personal goals and the goals they assumed their partners to have. Trained coders rated the overlap between the self-reported and the ascribed goals. Actor-partner interdependence models showed that knowing one's partner's goals was associated with a higher level of partnership satisfaction after about 16 months, controlling for initial partnership satisfaction. Having a partner who knows one's goals, by contrast, predicted greater feelings of closeness to that partner after the same period of time, controlling for initial levels of closeness; and this association could not be attributed to a greater similarity between both partners' goals. Overall, this research shows that both the 'I know you' and the 'You know me' components contribute to positive partnership development, and that their specific implications vary for different facets of partnership quality.

FACES--a database of facial expressions in young, middle-aged, and older women and men: development and validation.

Faces are widely used as stimuli in various research fields. Interest in emotion-related differences and age-associated changes in the processing of faces is growing. With the aim of systematically varying both expression and age of the face, we created FACES, a database comprising N = 171 naturalistic faces of young, middle-aged, and older women and men. Each face is represented with two sets of six facial expressions (neutrality, sadness, disgust, fear, anger, and happiness), resulting in 2,052 individual images. A total of N = 154 young, middle-aged, and older women and men rated the faces in terms of facial expression and perceived age. With its large age range of faces displaying different expressions, FACES is well suited for investigating developmental and other research questions on emotion, motivation, and cognition, as well as their interactions. Information on using FACES for research purposes can be found at http://faces.mpib-berlin.mpg.de.

Thinking mindfully: How mindfulness relates to rumination and reflection in daily life.

Mindfulness is a state of awareness comprising an attentional focus on the present moment and a nonjudgmental stance. It is associated with affective well-being and assumed to facilitate adaptive emotion regulation. To support this claim at the within-person level, we investigated associations between 2 mindfulness facets (present-moment attention and nonjudgmental acceptance), 2 emotion-regulation strategies varying in adaptiveness (rumination and reflection), and positive and negative affect in everyday life using data from 2 experience-sampling (ESM) studies. Study 1 consisted of N = 70 students who completed 54 prompts on average. Study 2 consisted of N = 179 middle-aged adults who completed 69 prompts on average. Results from both studies were highly consistent: The mindfulness facet nonjudgmental acceptance was more strongly related to less concurrent rumination, whereas the mindfulness facet present-moment attention was related to more concurrent reflection. As predicted, both mindfulness facets interacted with rumination in the prediction of changes in affect. When individuals were in a more mindful state, rumination was less strongly associated with increases in negative affect, and was less strongly associated with decreases in positive affect. However, mindfulness interacted with reflection in the prediction of changes in affect in an unexpected way: At higher levels of nonjudgmental acceptance, reflection was no longer associated with changes in affect. Together, these results suggest that emotion regulation strategies can be more or less adaptive depending on the level of mindfulness. They also accord with the proposal that mindfulness inhibits maladaptive emotion regulation and its impact on affective well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Higher well-being is related to reduced affective reactivity to positive events in daily life.

Within the study of emotions, researchers have increasingly stressed the importance of studying individual differences in emotion dynamics and emotional responding and the way these relate to more stable differences in well-being. However, there is no clear picture regarding affective reactivity to positive events and how different emotional reactions relate to differences in well-being, particularly higher levels of well-being. Theoretical work and empirical findings from different lines of research (e.g., clinical studies, aging literature, positive and personality psychology) support either of 2 predictions: Higher well-being is related to an enhanced or reduced affective reactivity to positive events in daily life. Testing these opposing predictions, we examined global well-being and affective reactivity to daily positive events in 6 studies using the experience-sampling or daily diary method (Ns = 70, 66, 95, 200, 76, and 101). Global well-being was measured with various indicators and a well-being composite score. Across the majority of studies, we found that higher global well-being was associated with reduced affective reactivity to positive events in daily life, as shown by smaller decreases in momentary negative affect. In 3 of the 6 studies, higher well-being composite scores were also associated with smaller increases in momentary positive affect. These findings seem to suggest that people with higher global well-being profit less from the joy of a positive event they experience in daily life. Instead, for people with lower well-being, positive events might be a meaningful way to brighten one's momentary mood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Mix it to fix it: Emotion regulation variability in daily life.

Emotion regulation (ER) strategies are often categorized as universally adaptive or maladaptive. However, it has recently been proposed that this view is overly simplistic: instead, adaptive ER involves applying strategies variably to meet contextual demands. Using data from four experience-sampling studies (Ns = 70, 95, 200, and 179), we tested the relationship between ER variability and negative affect (NA) in everyday life. The constantly changing demands of daily life provide a more ecologically valid context in which to test the role of variability. We calculated 2 global indicators of variability: within-strategy variability (of particular strategies across time) and between-strategy variability (across strategies at one time-point). Associations between within-strategy variability and NA were inconsistent. In contrast, when controlling for mean strategy endorsement, between-strategy variability was associated with reduced NA across both individuals and measurement occasions. This is the first evidence that variably choosing between different strategies within a situation may be adaptive in daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Same old, same old? Age differences in the diversity of daily life.

Some research suggests that compared with younger adults, older adults have more homogeneous, less diverse daily life experiences because everyday situations and activities become increasingly stable and routine. However, strong empirical tests of this assumption are scarce. In two complementary studies, we examined whether older age is associated with less diversity in daily life experiences (e.g., regarding social interaction partners, activities, and places across and within days) and, if so, to what extent health limitations account for these age differences. In Study 1, we used daily diaries to investigate diversity across days among younger (N = 246; Mage = 21.8 years, SD = 2.5) and older adults (N = 119; Mage = 67.7 years, SD = 5.3). In Study 2, we investigated diversity within days employing experience sampling methods over three weeks in an adult life span sample (N = 365; range = 14-88 years). Results showed that across and within days, the daily lives of older adults were less diverse regarding their social interaction partners. Yet, older adults reported more diversity in activities within days and across days in the afternoons, whereas younger adults reported less diverse activities partly due to working or studying more often. Age differences remained statistically significant when controlling for health limitations. We conclude that age differences in the diversity of daily life are nuanced, depending on the domain and the level of analysis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Seeking pleasure and seeking pain: differences in prohedonic and contra-hedonic motivation from adolescence to old age.

Using a mobile-phone-based experience-sampling technology in a sample of 378 individuals ranging from 14 to 86 years of age, we investigated age differences in how people want to influence their feelings in their daily lives. Contra-hedonic motivations of wanting either to maintain or enhance negative affect or to dampen positive affect were most prevalent in adolescence, whereas prohedonic motivations of wanting either to maintain, but not enhance, positive affect or to dampen negative affect were most prevalent in old age. This pattern was mirrored by an age-related increase in self-reported day-to-day emotional well-being. Analyses of the emotional experiences that accompanied prohedonic and contra-hedonic motivations are consistent with the notions that contra-hedonic motivations are more likely to serve utilitarian than hedonic functions, and that people are more likely to be motivated to maintain negative affect when it is accompanied by positive affect. Implications for understanding affective development are discussed.