Linking Process and Outcome in the Study of Emotion and Aging

摘要

Current theory and research on emotion and aging suggests that (a) older adults report more positive affective experience(more happiness) than younger adults, (b) older adults attend to and remember emotionally valenced stimuli differently thanyounger adults (i.e., they show age-related positivity effects in attention and memory), and (c) the reason that older adultshave more positive affective experience is because the positivity effects they display serve as emotion regulatory strategies.It is suggested that age differences in cognitive processes therefore lead to the outcome of positive affective experience. In thisarticle, we critically review the literature on age differences in positive affective experience and on age-related positivity effectsin attention and memory. Furthermore, we question the extent to which existing evidence supports a link between age-relatedpositivity effects and positive affective outcomes.We then provide a framework for formally testing process-outcome links thatmight explain affective outcomes across adulthood. It may be that older adults (and others) do sometimes use their cognitionas a regulatory tool to help them feel good, but that can only be demonstrated by specifically linking cognitive processes, such asage-related positivity effects, with affective outcomes.These concepts have implications for cognition—emotion links at any age.