Emotion regulation and successful aging

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2012.06.007

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Volume 16, Issue 8, August 2012, Pages 409-410

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2012.06.007 Get rights and content

Despite normative declines in old age, healthy elderly typically report surprisingly high levels of well-being. It is not clear why this is so. A study by Brassen and colleagues suggests that one factor may be reduced responsiveness to regret. These findings highlight the role of emotion regulation in successful aging.

Section snippets

Healthy aging involves positive and negative emotion regulation

A growing literature suggests that healthy aging involves emotion regulation, defined as processes by which we influence which emotions we have, when we have them, and how we experience and express them [3]. Although emotion regulation applies to both positive and negative emotions, research to date has focused on the regulation of negative emotions, such as anger, sadness, and anxiety.

In our view, the Brassen et al. findings point to the role of positive emotion regulation in healthy aging.

Implicit and explicit control systems are important in emotion regulation

Researchers interested in the neural bases of emotion regulation have focused on the explicit down-regulation of negative emotion regulation. Several dozen studies have identified prefrontal control systems that include the lateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex [6]. Far less is known about explicit positive emotion regulation, but available studies suggest that these same prefrontal regions are implicated here, too [4].

Not all emotion regulation is explicit, however, and recent research has

Emotion regulation failure and psychopathology

A growing literature has investigated the associations between failures of emotion regulation and psychopathology [3]. The focus of these studies has been on failures of down-regulation of negative emotions in the context of disorders such as Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). For example, it has been shown that left-lateralized activation in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) occurs in non-depressed individuals when down-regulating negative affect, whereas depressed individuals show bilateral PFC

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Few studies have examined the relationships between emotion regulation, autobiographical memory and autobiographical narrative despite evidence that suggests that these constructs are linked. The lack of research is likely ascribed to the specificity of the construct of emotion regulation. The present review examines this area of investigation and indicates two directions for the research: first, emotion regulation is considered to be an effect of autobiographical narratives; thus, individuals engage in the construction of a life story to regulate emotions. Second, emotion regulation is an ability that improves the processes of encoding and retrieving memories. The results of this research are presented, and the potential developments are discussed in terms of the relations among these three constructs.
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Consistent with this notion, there is emerging evidence that emotion regulation processes continue to change and develop well into adulthood. For instance, recent interest has focused on the notion that while there are declines in sensory and cognitive domains, elderly adults seem to report higher levels of well-being than younger adults (Suri & Gross, 2012). Consistent with this, experimental tasks suggest that elderly adults experience less regret during risk-taking tasks than younger adults (Brassen, Gamer, Peters, Gluth, & Büchel, 2012).
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Trends in Cognitive Sciences

SpotlightEmotion regulation and successful aging

Section snippets

Healthy aging involves positive and negative emotion regulation

Implicit and explicit control systems are important in emotion regulation

Emotion regulation failure and psychopathology

Neuron

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Biol. Psychiatry

The influence of a sense of time on human development

Science

Don’t look back in anger! Responsiveness to missed chances in successful and nonsuccessful aging

Science

Spotlight
Emotion regulation and successful aging