Aging, Emotion Regulation, and Stress - Project Summary
Stress is a common part of daily life, and our ability to regulate our emotions in stressful situations
heavily determines our well-being and health. Importantly, emotion regulatory abilities generally
improve with age, and relative to earlier parts of the life span, later life is characterized by shifts toward
positivity: everyday emotional experience is on the whole filled with less negativity, and the processing
of emotional information shifts toward the positive. Given older adults’ general improvement in well-
being and emotional health, it may be assumed that older adults are better than younger adults at
responding to and regulating stress. Although age-related emotional strengths in later life can improve
our responses to some types of stressors (e.g., interpersonal conflict), age-related vulnerabilities may
compromise the ability to regulate emotions in other contexts. For instance, declines in deliberative
cognitive processing, increased sensitivity to threatening evaluations of cognitive performance, and
stress-induced physiological dysregulation may all impact the ability of older adults to regulate stress.
This project aims to understand situations under which older adults might non-optimally react to and
ineffectively regulate stress, and how to utilize their strengths to mitigate emotional dysregulation under
stress. Specifically, this research will: (1) explore adult age differences in emotional and physiological
reactivity to and regulation of interpersonal versus cognitively evaluative stressors, (2) demonstrate
whether older adults capitalize more on positivity when regulating stress responses than do younger
adults, and (3) examine the potential protective effect of emotion regulation in buffering the influence of
genetic risk on cognitive functioning. These aims will be met through two laboratory experiments that
examine the effects of interpersonal conflict versus cognitively evaluative stressors on emotion
regulation and physiological reactivity and recovery (e.g., cardiac output, heart rate, blood pressure) in
older and younger adults. In addition, the proposed research will examine how positive contexts (i.e.,
exposure to positive stimuli) may influence emotional and physiological responsivity and regulation
during stressful situations. Given the importance of positive emotions in the context of stress,
leveraging age-related positivity to enhance regulatory behaviors has significant implications for healthy
aging. Finally, the project will explore whether emotion regulation moderates the effects of deleterious
genetic risk factors on cognitive functioning. By pursuing these aims, this project promises to: better
inform our understanding of how the strengths and vulnerabilities of advanced age impact our ability to
regulate our emotions in different stressful situations, provide insight into how drawing on the strengths
of later life may assuage the detrimental effects of stress, and highlight the utility of emotion regulation
in protecting against age-related cognitive decline.
