Age Differences in Emotional Reactivity:The Age-Relevance of the Discrete Emotion Matters

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Initial evidence suggests that whereas older adults react with less anger to anger evoking stimuli than young adults, age differences in emotional reactions to sadness evoking stimuli are nonsignificant or even reverse. This age-differential pattern may be due to the age-related relevance of anger and sadness. Sadness is elicited by an irreversible loss and associated with low situational control, the tendency to flexibly adjust to unattainable goals, and the motivation to search for social support. To experience anger, by contrast, it is necessary that other individuals intentionally ignore or block a persons goals. Thus, anger is associated with high situational control, the tendency to tenaciously pursue ones goals, and the motivation for social influence. These emotion-specific appraisals and action tendencies differ in salience across the adult life span. To this end, young adulthood has been described as a phase of growth, during which individuals pursue and try to accomplish many new goals. Therefore, the elicitor of anger, an intentionally blocked goal, and the associated appraisals and action tendencies (i.e., tenaciousness) should be particularly salient in young adulthood. By contrast, old age has been characterized as a phase of developmental decline. Thus, sadness, typically elicited by irreversible losses, and the associated appraisals and action tendencies (i.e., flexible goal adjustment) should be particularly salient among older adults. In two laboratory studies, which expose young and older adults to anger and sadness evoking stimuli, we will test these ideas. We will assess younger and older adults subjective, facial-expressive, and physiological reactions to anger and sadness evoking stimuli as well as their associated specific appraisals and action tendencies. We hypothesize that age differences will appear across the different emotion reaction systems, in that smaller anger reactions and greater sadness reactions should be observed among older as compared with younger adults. We further expect that these age differences in emotional reactions are associated with age differences in generalized control beliefs, control behaviors, and social goals. Finally, we predict that age differences in anger and sadness reactivity serve adaptive functions, in that high anger reactivity is associated with subjective well-being in young adults and high sadness reactivity is associated with subjective well-being in older adults. These predictions derive from the idea that the function of negative emotions is to reduce an imbalance between the individual and the environment, and that an individuals age determines the effectiveness of different strategies to accomplish this task.