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人的一生中保持相对稳定。许多人、研究人员和普通人都认为这一证据令人惊讶，因为在许多领域，衰老与越来越多的损失有关。文献中讨论的成年后稳定且相对较高的情感幸福感的一种解释是，老年人在面对损失和其他不愉快的事件时，可能特别有效地调节负面情绪。然而，这一观点的经验证据喜忧参半，表明老年人可能只能够比年轻人更有效地实施一些情绪调节策略。根据这一证据，建议的研究项目的主要预测是，老年人优越的情绪调节专业知识可能与比年轻人更有效地实施每一种情绪调节策略有关，而是与选择那些与需要情绪调节的情景的负担和约束最匹配的策略有关。换句话说，老年人的情绪调节尝试可能比年轻人更具上下文敏感性。这一预测的证据将与更普遍的观点一致，即越来越有选择性和依赖于背景的资源分配代表着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.