Emotion Regulation Use Varies Across Socioecological Levels of Pandemic Stress in Older Adults.

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.

The Role of Autobiographical Resilience Memories in Emotion Regulation: An Account of Age Differences in Mnemonic and Positive Reappraisal.

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.

Remembering past challenges to feel better today: Role of neural dedifferentiation and autobiographical integration in late-life reappraisal.

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.

Age differences in cancer-related stress, spontaneous emotion regulation, and emotional distress.

OBJECTIVES: Cancer risk increases with age, cancer-related stress is common and devastating to mental health of patients, yet little work has explored age differences in cancer-related stress. This study investigated sources of stress related to cancer diagnosis and treatment and its association with age and emotional health. Though not an a priori aim of the study, adaptive strategies mentioned within discussions of stress-which we classify as spontaneous emotion regulation (ER) - were also investigated. METHOD: Participants (N = 147, aged 27-88) recruited from the VA (98% male) with oral-digestive cancers participated in semi-structured interviews regarding sources of stress 6-months post-diagnosis (T1) and treatment-related stress at 12-months post-diagnosis (T2). Patients also reported their emotional distress at T2 via the PROMIS-29. Inductive content analysis was used to classify sources of stress and ER into semantic themes and relative frequencies. RESULTS: The greatest source of stress at diagnosis was psychological; physical symptoms were the greatest source of stress at treatment. Older adults less frequently reported psychological uncertainty, social stress, and situational stress, whereas age groups reported similar rates of physical stress. When describing stress, older adults more often made spontaneous references to emotion regulation (ER). Across age groups, those who reported stress without ER in qualitative comments had higher emotional distress on the PROMIS-29 than those reporting stress with ER or no stress. CONCLUSION: ER may be key to psychological adjustment to cancer, especially in later-life. implications for assessment of stress at pivotal visits and mental health referral are discussed.

Effects of hunger on emotional arousal responses and attention/memory biases.

In this study, we examined how emotional arousal interacts with hunger states and the processing of food stimuli. In general, arousal enhances the processing of high-priority information at the expense of lower priority information (Mather & Sutherland, 2011). Because food has been a biologically relevant stimulus in primates throughout evolution, detecting it in the environment and remembering its location has high priority. In our study, inducing arousal enhanced attention to subsequent food stimuli. In addition, we manipulated whether participants were hungry or sated to examine how hunger states would influence emotional processing. Previous research reveals that being hungry is associated with increases in norepinephrine, a key neurotransmitter involved in the arousal response. We found that, when sated, participants showed greater pupil dilation to emotional than neutral stimuli. In contrast, when hungry, pupil dilation responses were as strong to neutral as to emotional stimuli. Thus, when hungry, participants were less effective at differentiating the intensity of arousal responses to emotional versus neutral stimuli because of high arousal responses to neutral stimuli. Memory for food stimuli was enhanced compared with memory for nonfood stimuli for all participants but especially for hungry participants. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Older and younger adult definitions of emotion terms: a mixed-method content analysis.

OBJECTIVES: Conceptualizations of emotions might evolve over the course of adult development as motivations shift, but there are gaps in knowledge regarding these changes. This mixed-methods study tested theoretical predictions pertaining to age group differences in conceptualizations of emotions. METHOD: University students (N = 210, M age = 20.1 years) and community-dwelling older adults (N = 90, M age = 72.5 years) participated in three survey studies (2016-2018) conducted in person, online, or via mail and provided written narrative definitions for 11 emotion words. Responses were coded for valence, arousal, time frame, reference to self, reference to social contacts, and nature of response (i.e. example or definition). Code frequencies were compared for younger and older adults via odds ratio and logistic regression analyses. RESULTS: Younger and older adults used many of the same words in definitions of emotion terms. Older participants more often referenced situational examples in their definitions than younger participants. As expected, older adults used more low arousal language, referenced the 'self,' and included other persons more in their emotion descriptions than younger persons. Unexpectedly, younger participants used more positive language in descriptions of some positive emotions. CONCLUSIONS: Descriptions of emotion terms might serve a self-regulatory function, such as to facilitate low arousal emotion experiences for older adults or to illustrate important values, such as the greater importance of other persons to emotion experiences for older than younger adults.

Proactive versus reactive emotion regulation: A dual-mechanisms perspective.

Emotion regulation (ER) relies on cognitive processing, but the foundational control mechanisms involved remain unclear. The process model of ER posits that different strategies occur at different points in time, with antecedent strategies occurring relatively early and response-focused strategies later in the affective time course. In parallel with this model, the dual mechanisms of control (DMC) theoretical framework proposes that cognitive control operates via 2 temporally distinct modes: anticipatory preparation to exert control (proactive control) and momentary cognitive engagement as the need arises (reactive control). However, empirical investigations of the role of proactive and reactive control in ER have been limited. In this article, we examine how ER processes can be characterized within the DMC framework, integrating these 2 theoretical perspectives. We first posit that any ER strategy may take place either prior or subsequent to onset of an emotional stimulus, depending on whether it is proactively or reactively enacted. Then, using reappraisal as an example, we discuss ER strategy use via both control modes. We further assert that proactive ER can be implemented in a global- or stimulus-dependent fashion and discuss how this implementation may affect the time course and cognitive load of ER strategies. We conclude by discussing how controlling for timing in future research may clarify how populations with reduced cognitive control may demonstrate intact ER (i.e., through greater reliance on reactive and/or global strategies) and how incorporation of the DMC perspective may inform ER interventions for clinical populations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).