Age Differences in the Context-Sensitivity of Emotion Regulation Strategies.

经验证据表明，情感幸福感在整个成年期内保持相对稳定。许多人，研究人员和外行人都认为这一证据令人惊讶，因为衰老与许多领域的损失数量增加有关。在文献中讨论过的成年期情感幸福感稳定且相对较高的一种解释是，老年人在面对损失和其他不愉快事件时可能特别有效地调节负面情绪。然而，这一观点的经验证据是混合的，这表明老年人可能只能比年轻人更有效地实施一些情绪调节策略。从这个证据出发，拟议的研究项目的主要预测是，老年人的上级情绪调节的专业知识可能不涉及执行每一个策略的情绪调节比年轻的同行更有效，而是选择那些策略，提供最佳匹配的启示和限制的情况下，需要情绪调节。换句话说，老年人的情绪调节尝试可能比年轻人更敏感。这一预测的证据与更普遍的观点是一致的，即越来越多的选择性和环境依赖性的资源分配是成功老龄化的一条途径。

Empirical evidence suggests that affective well-being remains relatively stable across the adult lifespan. Many individuals, researchers and lay people alike, have considered this evidence surprising, given that aging is associated with an increasing number of losses in many domains. One explanation for the stable and relatively high level of affective well-being across adulthood that has been discussed in the literature is that older adults may be particularly effective at regulating negative emotions in the face of losses and other unpleasant events. Empirical evidence for this idea, however, is mixed, suggesting that older adults may only be able to implement some emotion regulation strategies more effectively than younger adults. Proceeding from this evidence, the main prediction of the proposed research project is that older adults’ superior emotion regulatory expertise may not relate to implementing each and every strategy of emotion regulation more effectively than their younger counterparts, but instead to selecting those strategies that provide the best match with the affordances and constraints of the situations that require emotion regulation. Put differently, older adults’ emotion regulatory attempts may be more context-sensitive than those of young adults. Evidence for this prediction would be consistent with the more general idea that an increasingly selective and context-dependent allocation of resources represents one pathway to successful aging.