Emotion regulation in younger and older couples: A multi-method study testing age differences in interpersonal emotion regulation

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Across the entire life span, emotional experience and emotion regulation are essential to the quality and stability of romantic relationships, and have a strong impact on well-being and health of both partners (Hoppmann & Gerstorf, 2009). Theoretically, intrapersonal (i.e., an individual regulates one’s own emotions) and interpersonal (i.e., an individual regulates the emotion of his or her partner) emotion regulation can be differentiated (Gross, 2014). However, despite the social embeddedness of emotional experience and emotion regulation, the majority of studies has adopted an individualistic approach and has almost exclusively focused on intrapersonal emotion regulation (e.g., Levenson et al., 2014). Life span theories such as the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (Carstensen, 2006) consider emotional aging as a domain of age-related gains, though, there is also evidence emphasizing the increasing dependency of emotional experience, emotion regulation, and regulatory success on contextual characteristics as well as on the availability of (decreasing) resources and (increasing) vulnerabilities (Urry & Gross, 2010). Due to focus on intrapersonal emotion regulation and the dominance of individualistic studies that ignore the social embeddedness of emotional experience and emotion regulation little is known about age differences in the frequency and the success of interpersonal emotion regulation, the role of underlying mechanisms of interpersonal emotion regulation, as well as its functionality in younger and older adulthood. The proposed project aims at answering these open questions by applying a comprehensive multi-method design. More concretely, it combines the advantages of experience-sampling methods that allow the assessment of interpersonal emotion regulation in daily-life, with a laboratory study that offers high experimental control. In doing so, it allows a thorough view on the performance (i.e., how often do younger and older couples regulate their partner’s emotion) and the competence (i.e., how successful are younger and older couples in regulating their partner’s emotion), and its association with well-being and health of both partners. Moreover, the project will deepen our understanding of interpersonal emotion regulation by considering different levels of emotional reactivity (e.g., subjective experience, facial and verbal behavior, physiological reactivity) as well as assessing subjective and objective indicators of regulatory success. The project does not only promise a deepened knowledge about interpersonal emotion regulation in adulthood, but also generates insights for interventions on successful aging processes