Emotion Regulation Failures in Daily Life in Younger and Older Adults

TL;DR

The study explores how younger and older adults regulate emotions in daily life and finds that emotion regulation failures are not less common in older adults.

Contribution

The study introduces a focus on emotion regulation failures rather than attempts, revealing age-related differences in emotional responses during failures.

Findings

Older adults did not have fewer emotion regulation failures compared to younger adults.

Using positive-approach tactics increased the likelihood of emotion regulation failures across all ages.

Older adults reported more positive feelings and higher arousal during regulation failures.

Abstract

Can better emotion regulation abilities explain why older adults report higher levels of emotional well-being? While most research compares age groups on emotion regulation attempts, we considered whether older adults report fewer emotion regulation failures than younger adults. We conducted a daily diary study asking for daily reports every day for 10 days (n = 1036 observations). We asked younger adult participants (n = 79, Mage = 20.6, SDage = 1.92) and older adult participants (n = 75, Mage = 73.2, SDage = 8.47) to identify episodes in which they had attempted to regulate their emotions. For these attempts, participants indicated whether they had succeeded or failed to regulate, and the valence, arousal, and effort associated with their regulation attempt. In predicting emotion regulation failures, we did not find a significant age difference in the likelihood of success vs. failures (OR = 0.70, p = 0.111). Instead, the use of positive-approach regulation tactics (i.e., focusing attention on positive aspects of a situation) was associated with emotion regulation failures for all ages (OR = 2.91, p = 0.001). Among those participants who experienced an emotion regulation failure, older adults were more likely to report positive feelings (β = 0.23, p = .007), higher arousal (β = 1.33, p < .001), and greater effort expenditure in emotion regulation (β = 0.27, p = 0.018). Emotion regulation failures may not differentiate younger and older adults overall but may still provide some clues about how age groups differ in their unfolding emotion regulation behavior.