Expanding the knowledge base for emotion regulation in aging

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Program Director/Principal Investigator (Last, First, Middle): Ochsner, Kevin N. By 2040, the number of adults aged 65+ is expected to comprise approximately 22% of the U.S. population1. Given this 175% increase in the older adult population, it is imperative that basic research expand the evidence base concerning normative age-related maturational shifts in emotion regulation processes – processes that support adaptive responding to life stressors and promote health and well-being. RFA-MH-17-405 calls for exactly this type of research, with a key question concerning what mechanisms underlie the paradoxical finding that health and cognitive abilities decline with age but older adults report more positive emotion in their daily lives and preferentially attend to and remember positive stimuli and events. Emotion regulation has been advanced as a possible key factor underlying this positivity bias. Studies now show that older adults can effectively use certain classes of regulatory strategies, including situation-focused, attentional, and response- focused strategies. Although early studies appeared to show age-related impairments in older adults use of the powerful and widely deployable cognitive strategy reappraisal, our recent pilot studies show that this depends on how one reappraises: older adults are less able to cognitively minimize the impact of negative events but can positivize their reponses by finding positive meaning in them. Evolving models of emotion regulation from our lab and others suggest a major limitation of such work, however: It focuses exclusively on the ability to implement regulatory strategies when instructed to do so, and ignores two critical processing stages that may necessarily precede strategy implementation: First, the identification of one's current emotional state and second, the decision whether and how to change this state. To date, little to no attention has been paid to potential age-related changes in these two key regulatory stages. In three Aims, this grant will test this evolving model and address these critical gaps in knowledge. Aim 1 will combine fMRI with a novel psychophyisical task to ask how different ways of identifying you emotions can have different emotion regulatory effects for older vs. younger adults. Aim 2 will use a novel variant of our established fMRI methods for studying reappraisal to ask whether and how older and younger adults differ in decisions to reappraise, and if so, using minimizing vs. positivizing reappraisals. Exploratory Aim 3 attempts to connect these lab-based behavioral and brain markers of emotional response and regulation to measures of daily emotional experience and regulatory goals as assessed using ecological momentary assessment (EMA). Together, the proposed research could provide new answers for the emotion paradox of aging – suggesting that the positivity bias could arise in part from age- related differences in the unappreciated regulatory effects of identifying your emotions and the ways decisions are made to regulate those emotions. In so doing, we will broaden the knowledge base concerning the psychological and neural underpinnings of emotion regulation and how they change across the lifespan, with implications for designing possible future interventions to improve emotional well-being. OMB No. 0925-0001/0002 (Rev. 03/16 Approved Through 10/31/2018) Page Continuation Format Page