Age-related differences in event-related potentials for early visual processing of emotional faces.

With advancing age, processing resources are shifted away from negative emotional stimuli and toward positive ones. Here, we explored this 'positivity effect' using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants identified the presence or absence of a visual probe that appeared over photographs of emotional faces. The ERPs elicited by the onsets of angry, sad, happy and neutral faces were recorded. We examined the frontocentral emotional positivity (FcEP), which is defined as a positive deflection in the waveforms elicited by emotional expressions relative to neutral faces early on in the time course of the ERP. The FcEP is thought to reflect enhanced early processing of emotional expressions. The results show that within the first 130 ms young adults show an FcEP to negative emotional expressions, whereas older adults show an FcEP to positive emotional expressions. These findings provide additional evidence that the age-related positivity effect in emotion processing can be traced to automatic processes that are evident very early in the processing of emotional facial expressions.

Age-related differences in altruism across adulthood: making personal financial gain versus contributing to the public good.

Four studies utilizing different methodological approaches investigated adult age-related differences in altruism (i.e., contributions to the public good) and the self-centered value of increasing personal wealth. In Study 1, data from the World Values Survey (World Values Survey Association, 2009) provided 1st evidence of a negative association between age and the self-reported wish to be rich. Ecological concerns, a form of contributing to the public good, were positively related to age. Study 2 investigated whether these values are expressed behaviorally when participants solved a complex problem that allowed striving for monetary gains or contributing to a public good. Confirming hypotheses, young adults' strategies were consistent with the aim of optimizing personal financial gain, and older adults' strategies with the aim to contribute to the public good. Studies 3 and 4 showed that older adults were more likely than younger and middle-aged adults to donate money to a good cause than to keep it for themselves. Study 4 manipulated participants' future time perspective as a factor potentially contributing to age-related differences. Partly confirming hypotheses, a longer time perspective reduced donations by older adults, but a shorter time perspective did not increase donations by younger adults. These studies suggest that older adults not only report valuing contributions to the public good more highly but also are more likely to behave altruistically than younger adults. All studies used cross-sectional designs that prevent a strict test of developmental trajectories but rather provide age-related differences at 1 point in time, representing a 1st step in investigating adult age-related differences in altruism.

Age differences in emotional responses to daily stress: the role of timing, severity, and global perceived stress.

Research on age differences in emotional responses to daily stress has produced inconsistent findings. Guided by recent theoretical advances in aging theory (S. T. Charles, 2010, Strength and vulnerability integration: A model of emotional well-being across adulthood, Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 136, pp. 1068-1091) that emphasize the importance of context for predicting when and how age is related to affective well-being, the current study examined age differences in emotional responses to everyday stressors. The present study examined how three contextual features (e.g., timing of exposure, stressor severity, global perceived stress [GPS]) moderate age differences in emotional experience in an ecological momentary assessment study of adults (N = 190) aged 18-81 years. Results indicated that older adults' negative affect (NA) was less affected by exposure to recent stressors than younger adults, but that there were no age differences in the effects of stressor exposure 3-6 hr afterward. Higher levels of GPS predicted amplified NA responses to daily stress, and controlling for GPS eliminated age differences in NA responses to stressors. No age differences in NA responses as a function of stressor severity were observed. In contrast, older age was associated with less of a decrease in PA when exposed to recent stressors or with more severe recent stressors. There were no age differences in the effect of previous stressor exposure or severity on PA, or any interactions between momentary or previous stress and GPS on PA. Together, these results support the notion that chronic stress plays a central role in emotional experience in daily life. We discuss the implications of these results for emotion theories of aging.

Linking Process and Outcome in the Study of Emotion and Aging.

Current theory and research on emotion and aging suggests that (a) older adults report more positive affective experience (more happiness) than younger adults, (b) older adults attend to and remember emotionally valenced stimuli differently than younger adults (i.e., they show age-related positivity effects in attention and memory), and (c) the reason that older adults have more positive affective experience is because the positivity effects they display serve as emotion regulatory strategies. It is suggested that age differences in cognitive processes therefore lead to the outcome of positive affective experience. In this article, we critically review the literature on age differences in positive affective experience and on age-related positivity effects in attention and memory. Furthermore, we question the extent to which existing evidence supports a link between age-related positivity effects and positive affective outcomes. We then provide a framework for formally testing process-outcome links that might explain affective outcomes across adulthood. It may be that older adults (and others) do sometimes use their cognition as a regulatory tool to help them feel good, but that can only be demonstrated by specifically linking cognitive processes, such as age-related positivity effects, with affective outcomes. These concepts have implications for cognition-emotion links at any age.

Violate my beliefs? Then you're to blame! Belief content as an explanation for causal attribution biases.

We examined the extent to which the content of beliefs about appropriate behavior in social situations influences blame attributions for negative outcomes in relationship situations. Young, middle-aged, and older adults indicated their level of agreement to a set of traditional and nontraditional beliefs. Five months later, we assessed the degree to which these same individuals blamed traditional and nontraditional characters who violated their beliefs in 12 social conflict situations. Older adults held more traditional beliefs regarding appropriate relationship behaviors (e.g., the acceptability of premarital sex). Individual differences in the content of one's beliefs were needed to understand age-related patterns in blame attributions; for example, adherence to traditional beliefs about appropriate relationship behaviors led to higher responsibility and blame attributions toward characters behaving in ways that were inconsistent with these beliefs. Structural regression models showed that beliefs fully mediated the effects of working memory and need for closure on causal attributions and partially mediated the effects of age and religiosity on attributions. Personal identification with the characters had additional, independent effects on attributions. Findings are discussed from the theoretical perspective of a belief-based explanation of social judgment biases.

If only I had taken my usual route : age-related differences in counter-factual thinking.

Previous research suggests that young adults can shift between rational and experiential modes of thinking when forming social judgments. The present study examines whether older adults demonstrate this flexibility in thinking. Young and older adults completed an If-only task adapted from Epstein, Lipson, and Huh's (1992 , Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 328) examination of individuals' ability to adopt rational or experiential modes of thought while making a judgment about characters who experience a negative event that could have been avoided. Consistent with our expectations for their judgments of the characters, young adults shifted between experiential and rational modes of thought when instructed to do so. Conversely, regardless of the mode of thought being used or the order with which they adopted the different modes of thought (i.e., shifting from experiential to rational in Study 1 and from rational to experiential in Study 2), older adults consistently offered judgments and justifications that reflected a preference for experiential-based thought.

Problem-solving variability in older spouses: how is it linked to problem-, person-, and couple-characteristics?

Problem-solving does not take place in isolation and often involves social others such as spouses. Using repeated daily life assessments from 98 older spouses (M age = 72 years; M marriage length = 42 years), the present study examined theoretical notions from social-contextual models of coping regarding (a) the origins of problem-solving variability and (b) associations between problem-solving and specific problem-, person-, and couple- characteristics. Multilevel models indicate that the lion's share of variability in everyday problem-solving is located at the level of the problem situation. Importantly, participants reported more proactive emotion regulation and collaborative problem-solving for social than nonsocial problems. We also found person-specific consistencies in problem-solving. That is, older spouses high in Neuroticism reported more problems across the study period as well as less instrumental problem-solving and more passive emotion regulation than older spouses low in Neuroticism. Contrary to expectations, relationship satisfaction was unrelated to problem-solving in the present sample. Results are in line with the stress and coping literature in demonstrating that everyday problem-solving is a dynamic process that has to be viewed in the broader context in which it occurs. Our findings also complement previous laboratory-based work on everyday problem-solving by underscoring the benefits of examining everyday problem-solving as it unfolds in spouses' own environment.

Is longing only for Germans? A cross-cultural comparison of Sehnsucht in Germany and the United States.

Sehnsucht, the longing or yearning for ideal yet seemingly unreachable states of life, is a salient topic in German culture and has proven useful for understanding self-regulation across adulthood in a German sample (e.g., Scheibe, Freund, & Baltes, 2007). The current study tested whether findings for German samples could be generalized to the more individualistic and agentic U.S. American culture. Four samples of U.S. American and German participants (total N = 1,276) age 18 to 81 years reported and rated their 2 most important life longings and completed measures of subjective well-being and health. Measurement equivalence was established at the level of factor loadings for central life longing characteristics. German and U.S. American participants did not differ in self-reported ease of identifying personal life longings or their intensity. In comparison to Germans, however, U.S. Americans associated life longings less with utopian, unattainable states and reported less salience of the concept in everyday life. Associations with measures of adaptation suggest that life longings can be both functional and dysfunctional for development in both cultures.

Beliefs about behavior account for age differences in the correspondence bias.

OBJECTIVES: Older adults tend to exhibit the correspondence bias to a greater extent than young adults. The current study examined whether these age differences are a function of the degree to which an individual subscribes to a lay theory of attitude-behavior consistency. METHODS: First, participants responded to questions regarding their beliefs about attitude-behavior consistency. Approximately 2 weeks later, 144 (67 young adults and 77 older adults) participants completed the correspondence bias task. RESULTS: As expected, older adults were more biased than young adults. Analyses revealed that the degree to which an individual holds attitude-behavior consistency beliefs in the dishonesty domain accounted for age-related differences in the correspondence bias. DISCUSSION: The results of this study suggest that age differences in the correspondence bias task are in part driven by older adults holding stronger attitude-behavior consistency beliefs than young adults.

Anger management: age differences in emotional modulation of visual processing.

Although positive and negative images enhance the visual processing of young adults, recent work suggests that a life-span shift in emotion processing goals may lead older adults to avoid negative images. To examine this tendency for older adults to regulate their intake of negative emotional information, the current study investigated age-related differences in the perceptual boost received by probes appearing over facial expressions of emotion. Visually-evoked event-related potentials were recorded from the scalp over cortical regions associated with visual processing as a probe appeared over facial expressions depicting anger, sadness, happiness, or no emotion. The activity of the visual system in response to each probe was operationalized in terms of the P1 component of the event-related potentials evoked by the probe. For young adults, the visual system was more active (i.e., greater P1 amplitude) when the probes appeared over any of the emotional facial expressions. However, for older adults, the visual system displayed reduced activity when the probe appeared over angry facial expressions.

Goals and everyday problem solving: manipulating goal preferences in young and older adults.

In the present study, we examined the link between goal and problem-solving strategy preferences in 130 young and older adults using hypothetical family problem vignettes. At baseline, young adults preferred autonomy goals, whereas older adults preferred generative goals. Imagining an expanded future time perspective led older adults to show preferences for autonomy goals similar to those observed in young adults but did not eliminate age differences in generative goals. Autonomy goals were associated with more self-focused instrumental problem solving, whereas generative goals were related to more other-focused instrumental problem solving in the no-instruction and instruction conditions. Older adults were better at matching their strategies to their goals than young adults were. This suggests that older adults may become better at selecting their strategies in accordance with their goals. Our findings speak to a contextual approach to everyday problem solving by showing that goals are associated with the selection of problem-solving strategies.

Introduction to the special section on intraindividual variability and aging.

This preface introduces articles that appear in the special section on intraindividual variability and aging and illustrate what intraindividual variability might contribute to the study of development. These articles exemplify the variety of conceptual perspectives, analytical methods, and types of data that are being used to study intraindividual variability and illustrate what the study of intraindividual variability might contribute to the study of development.

Flexible and adaptive socio-emotional problem solving in adult development and aging.

PURPOSE: Despite decline in basic cognitive mechanisms, aging adults may also possess abilities that allow them to function quite effectively, particularly when cognition is examined in a socio-emotional context. In this article, I highlight the importance of the functional dynamics or the ability to effectively adapt to the demands and opportunities that individuals are confronted with on an everyday basis. METHODS: This overview takes into consideration how life experiences, social interactions, beliefs, and emotions influence motivational goals for processing information in daily life. I present an integrative representation of my empirical work and theorizing on the impact of socio-emotional contextual factors in older adulthood by identifying developmental mechanisms and contexts that determine when older adults' everyday problem solving and emotion regulation is optimal or adaptive and when it is not. RESULTS: Older adults display flexibility in problem solving and emotion regulation strategy use as well as a decrease in the amount of resources necessary to maintain or regain emotional well-being, while performing well at other tasks. CONCLUSIONS: We suggest that growing older has the adaptive potential to effectively solve problems, regulate emotions, and reduce the cognitive costs of emotion regulation, further corroborating findings of a positive and flexible developmental trajectory for emotional control with increasing age.

Developmental emergence and functionality of Sehnsucht (life longings): the sample case of involuntary childlessness in middle-aged women.

Sehnsucht (life longings), the intense desire for optimal (utopian) states of life that are remote or unattainable, was recently introduced into life-span psychology as a concept of self-regulation (P. B. Baltes, 2008; S. Scheibe, A. M. Freund, & P. B. Baltes, 2007). The authors propose that as a compensatory strategy to deal with nonrealizability and loss, life longings may develop out of blocked goals. Individuals would cease to invest behavioral effort into its attainment and instead maintain the goal target in imagination. In a sample of 168 middle-aged childless women, the present study investigated the circumstances under which the wish for children emerges as a goal or life longing and whether the representation of the wish for children as a life longing is beneficial for well-being. The wish for children was expressed as a goal when participants rated this wish as currently intense and attainable. In contrast, it was expressed as a life longing when participants rated it as highly intense and long-standing. The pursuit of the wish for children as a life longing was positively related to well-being only when participants had high control over the experience of this life longing and when other self-regulation strategies (goal adjustment) failed.

Effects of regulating emotions on cognitive performance: what is costly for young adults is not so costly for older adults.

The authors examined whether instructions to regulate emotions after a disgust-inducing film clip created an equally costly cognitive load across adulthood. Young and older adults across all instructional conditions initially demonstrated increased working memory performance after mood induction, typical of practice effects. Age-group differences emerged at the 2nd postinduction trial. When instructed to down-regulate disgust feelings, older adults' performance continually increased, whereas young adults' performance dropped. Instructions to maintain disgust did not affect working memory performance. Consistent with claims that older adults are more effective at regulating emotions, findings indicate that intentional down-regulation of negative emotions may be less costly in older age.

The experience of anger and sadness in everyday problems impacts age differences in emotion regulation.

The authors examined regulation of the discrete emotions anger and sadness in adolescents through older adults in the context of describing everyday problem situations. The results support previous work; in comparison to younger age groups, older adults reported that they experienced less anger and reported that they used more passive and fewer proactive emotion-regulation strategies in interpersonal situations. The experience of anger partially mediated age differences in the use of proactive emotion regulation. This suggests that at least part of the reason why older adults use fewer proactive emotion-regulation strategies is their decreased experience of anger. Results are discussed in the context of lifespan theories of emotional development.

Challenges older adults face in detecting deceit: the role of emotion recognition.

Facial expressions of emotion are key cues to deceit (M. G. Frank & P. Ekman, 1997). Given that the literature on aging has shown an age-related decline in decoding emotions, we investigated (a) whether there are age differences in deceit detection and (b) if so, whether they are related to impairments in emotion recognition. Young and older adults (N = 364) were presented with 20 interviews (crime and opinion topics) and asked to decide whether each interview subject was lying or telling the truth. There were 3 presentation conditions: visual, audio, or audiovisual. In older adults, reduced emotion recognition was related to poor deceit detection in the visual condition for crime interviews only.

Emotion regulation in interpersonal problems: the role of cognitive-emotional complexity, emotion regulation goals, and expressivity.

Young, middle-aged, and older adults' emotion regulation strategies in interpersonal problems were examined. Participants imagined themselves in anger- or sadness-eliciting situations with a close friend. Factor analyses of a new questionnaire supported a 4-factor model of emotion regulation strategies, including passivity, expressing emotions, seeking emotional information or support, and solving the problem. Results suggest that age differences in emotion regulation (such as older adults' increased endorsement of passive emotion regulation relative to young adults) are partially due to older adults' decreased ability to integrate emotion and cognition, increased prioritization of emotion regulation goals, and decreased tendency to express anger.

Goals and everyday problem solving: examining the link between age-related goals and problem-solving strategy use.

Qualitative interviews on family and financial problems from 332 adolescents, young, middle-aged, and older adults, demonstrated that developmentally relevant goals predicted problem-solving strategy use over and above problem domain. Four focal goals concerned autonomy, generativity, maintaining good relationships with others, and changing another person. We examined both self- and other-focused problem-solving strategies. Autonomy goals were associated with self-focused instrumental problem solving and generative goals were related to other-focused instrumental problem solving in family and financial problems. Goals of changing another person were related to other-focused instrumental problem solving in the family domain only. The match between goals and strategies, an indicator of problem-solving adaptiveness, showed that young individuals displayed the greatest match between autonomy goals and self-focused problem solving, whereas older adults showed a greater match between generative goals and other-focused problem solving. Findings speak to the importance of considering goals in investigations of age-related differences in everyday problem solving.

Cultural differences in the relationship between aging and the correspondence bias.

Previous work suggests that older adults show a stronger correspondence bias than do young adults. In the present study we examine whether age differences in the correspondence bias are universal or if they differ across cultures. A sample of young and older adults from China completed an attitude-attribution paradigm. We compared these data with an existing American data set. We found cultural differences in the extremity of the ratings. Chinese participants reported less extreme attitude ratings than did the participants in our American sample. Furthermore, we found cultural differences in the correspondence bias only in the older adult samples, with older Americans displaying a greater bias than older Chinese. We discuss our findings from a life-span developmental perspective as well as from an acculturation perspective.