Understanding age differences in emotional experience

情绪调节对人体功能至关重要。因为情绪经常在社会环境中体验，情绪调节对于成功的社会关系是必要的，这反过来又影响健康状况甚至死亡率。研究年龄差异的研究表明，情绪调节在整个成年期都有所改善，但很少有研究探讨这些年龄相关变化背后的机制。本研究将探讨年龄与情绪体验之间关系的两个潜在中介变量--生活经验和认知评价风格。具体来说，这两个因素被假设影响情绪的程度（悲伤与愤怒），以响应负面刺激。年轻和年长的参与者（N = 180）将观看设计有可能引起不同负面情绪的电影片段（即，悲伤和愤怒）。参与者将完成关于每个电影片段的情感体验和认知评价的问卷。假设：1）当观看引起负面情绪的电影片段时，与年轻人的报告相比，老年人将报告更少的愤怒和更多的悲伤; 2）认知评估（即，更大的情景归因和从多个角度观看场景）将与较低水平的愤怒有关; 3）经历过更多生活的人将报告更多的情绪混合，他们也将报告悲伤的程度比愤怒更大，以回应电影剪辑。这项研究将提供有关年龄相关的心理策略的信息，这些策略可能会教给年轻人（即，认知评价），并在未来检查这些策略对情绪刺激的生理反应的影响，以帮助理解身体和情绪功能之间的关系，以及这种关系如何随着年龄的变化。

Emotion regulation is vital for human functioning. Because emotions are frequently experienced in a social context emotion regulation is necessary for successful social relationships, which in turn influence health status and even mortality. Studies examining age differences suggest that emotion regulation improves across the adult life span, yet few studies have explored the mechanisms behind these age-related changes. The proposed study will examine two potential mediators- life experience and cognitive appraisal style- for the relationship between age and emotional experience. Specifically, these two factors are hypothesized to influence the degree to which emotions are experienced (sadness versus anger) in response to negative stimuli. Younger and older participants (N=180) will view film clips designed with the potential to elicit different negative emotions (i.e., sadness and anger). Participants will complete questionnaires about the emotions experienced and their cognitive appraisals about each film clip. It is hypothesized that: 1) When viewing negative emotion-eliciting film clips, older adults will report less anger and more sadness compared to the reports of younger adults; 2) Cognitive appraisals (i.e., greater situational attributions and viewing thee scenario from multiple perspectives) will be related to lower levels of anger; 3) People who have experienced greater numbers of life will report a greater mix of emotions, and they will also report sadness to a greater extent than anger in response to the film clips. This study will provide information about age-related psychological strategies that potentially could be taught to younger adults (i.e.,cognitive appraisals) to and in the future to examine the effects of these strategies on physiological responses to emotional stimuli to aid in understanding the relationship between physical and emotional functioning, and how this relationship may change with age.