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

在整个生命周期中，情感体验和情绪调节对浪漫关系的质量和稳定性至关重要，对伴侣双方的幸福和健康都有很大的影响（Hoppmann & Gerstorf, 2009）。从理论上讲，可以区分人际情绪调节（即个人调节自己的情绪）和人际情绪调节（即个人调节其伴侣的情绪）（Gross, 2014）。然而，尽管情绪体验和情绪调节具有社会嵌入性，但大多数研究都采用了个人主义的方法，几乎只关注个人内部的情绪调节（例如，Levenson等人，2014）。生命周期理论，如社会情绪选择性理论（Carstensen, 2006）认为情绪老化是一个与年龄相关的增益领域，尽管如此，也有证据强调情绪体验、情绪调节和调节成功对情境特征以及资源可用性（减少）和脆弱性（增加）的依赖性越来越大（Urry & Gross, 2010）。人际情绪调节的频率和成功程度的年龄差异、人际情绪调节的潜在机制的作用以及人际情绪调节在青年期和老年期的功能，由于个人主义研究的关注和主导，忽视了情绪经验和情绪调节的社会嵌入性。拟议的项目旨在通过应用综合多方法设计来回答这些开放性问题。更具体地说，它结合了经验抽样方法的优点，这种方法可以评估日常生活中的人际情绪调节，而实验室研究提供了高实验控制。在这样做的过程中，它可以对表现（即，年轻夫妇和老年夫妇调节伴侣情绪的频率）和能力（即，年轻夫妇和老年夫妇在调节伴侣情绪方面的成功程度）及其与双方幸福和健康的关系进行全面的观察。此外，该项目将通过考虑不同层次的情绪反应（如主观经验、面部和言语行为、生理反应）以及评估调节成功的主观和客观指标，加深我们对人际情绪调节的理解。该项目不仅有望加深对成年期人际情绪调节的了解，而且还为成功衰老过程的干预提供了见解

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