Attention and Adult Emotion Regulation

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Accumulating evidence now points to older individuals being, on average, successful emotion regulators. Socioemotional selectivity theory (Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999) has been offered as a motivational account of how older individuals proactively regulate their socieomotionalfunctioning in the face of decreasing physical and cognitive resources. Recent studies on the cognitive mechanisms that facilitate this emotion regulation have suggested a positivity bias in older adults' information processing. However, while the findings of a positivity bias in aging have been consistent in the memory domain, the evidence for a positivity bias in attention has been more mixed. Moreover, most previous work on these patterns of information processing has simply observed cognitive biases toward emotional information among older adults and assumed that these biases are linked to emotion regulation. The studies in this proposal aim to directly investigate the role of information processing in on-line regulation of emotional states in adulthood and old age. Eye tracking will be used as a real-time measure of visual attention, and will be combined with other cognitive measures to provide a thorough assessment of on-line emotional processing. The first study will focus on demonstrating that older individuals use information processing as a tool to regulate their emotions as they happen; the second study will use a training paradigm to more conclusively demonstrate causal links between information processing biases and ability to regulate emotions in the face of negative information. Then, the final study will address the critical issue of the adaptive function of such emotion- regulating cognitive biases, by presenting health-relevant negative information and testing whether cognitive biases facilitate feeling good but impair health-promoting behavior. Together, the studies in the proposal will use cutting-edge technology to discern specifically how older individuals use information processing in the service of emotion regulation and whether this has costs for other processes. This work has clear implications not just for understanding socioemotional development in adulthood and old age, but also for clarifying causal links between cognition, ability to regulate emotions, and health-related outcomes.