RESUMO
OBJECTIVES: COVID-19 escalated stress within family/neighborhood (local) and national/cultural (global) levels. However, the impact of socioecological levels of stress on pandemic emotion regulation remains largely unexplored. METHODS: Thirty older adults from the Northeast US (63-92 years) reported on pandemic stress and emotion regulation in semi-structured interviews. Responses were coded into socioecological sources of local and global stress, and associated use of cognitive emotion regulation strategies from the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire was explored. RESULTS: Older adults experienced significant distress at global levels, and perception of lacking top-down safety governance may have exacerbated local distress of engaging in daily activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants endorsed coping with local stressors via perspective-taking, acceptance, and other adaptive strategies, while global sources of stress were associated with greater use of maladaptive strategies, including other-blame and rumination. CONCLUSION: Quantitative assessments may underestimate significant older adult distress and maladaptive coping toward global stressors. Findings should be replicated with more diverse populations beyond the COVID-19 context.
RESUMO
A lifetime of resilience through emotionally challenging experiences may benefit older adults, lending to emotion regulation mastery with time. Yet the influence of autobiographical experiences on momentary reappraisal, the reinterpretation of negative stimuli as more positive, has never been empirically tested. This online study examined the extent to which associating life memories of resilience with novel negative scenarios enhanced reappraisal efficacy and reduced difficulty to reappraise. Younger and older adults reappraised negative images by associating reappraisals to freely selected autobiographical resilience memories, cued autobiographical resilience memories, or by finding situational silver linings without mnemonic association (control). Changes in image emotional intensity ratings revealed no difference across reappraisal conditions for younger adults, while older adults most effectively down-regulated emotional intensity using the control reappraisal strategy. Older adults found autobiographical memories more helpful for mood regulation and less difficult to implement, and identified greater similarities between novel negative scenarios and their memories than younger adults. Surprisingly, greater similarity between resilience memories and negative images was associated with lower reappraisal efficacy for both age groups. Findings demonstrate the age-equivalent benefits of utilizing reappraisals associated with past narratives of resilience and suggest a sacrifice of immediate hedonic benefit for disproportionately greater subjective benefits with age.
RESUMO
Socioemotional theories suggest that surviving a lifetime of life experiences enhances older adult emotional resilience, yet the role of past emotional challenges in current models of emotion regulation is overlooked. In this paper, we propose how integration of memories and hippocampal dedifferentiation may together benefit the reappraisal of novel stressors across the lifespan. First, we review mood benefits of generating positive narratives, and more integrated memories of adverse life events with age. Second, we review neural mechanisms of narrative integration and meaning-making. We propose a framework in which narrative integration and neural dedifferentiation of hippocampal memory representations may facilitate late-life reappraisal via shared positive meaning-making in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). While current evidence supporting this model is limited, we conclude by discussing future directions for testing its components in multivariate neuroimaging studies, and briefly review clinical implications of the proposed model.