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Emotion complexity and emotion regulation across adulthood

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Abstract

This research used data from a study on daily emotional experience in adulthood to examine the associations between age, emotion complexity, and emotion regulation. Data were drawn from a study of daily stress that included 239 participants ranging in age from 18 to 89 from North Central Florida. Two indicators of emotion complexity were considered: emotion differentiation and the co-occurrence of positive and negative affect. Emotion regulation was assessed in terms of individuals’ likelihood of maintaining adaptive emotion states. There were no age differences in adults’ co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions. In contrast to theories suggesting age would be associated with greater emotion complexity, the findings revealed that older adults had lower differentiation scores than younger adults. Age was also associated with more adaptive patterns of emotion regulation. Specifically, older adults persisted in low negative states and moved out of high negative states more readily than younger adults. Finally, neuroticism, self-concept incoherence, mean daily stress, and emotion complexity were associated with emotion regulation. Notably, adults who reported a greater mix of positive and negative affect moved out of high negative affect states more rapidly than adults with lower co-occurrence scores. This finding is in keeping with a growing body of work suggesting that positive affect promotes recovery from negative affect. Overall, the findings suggest that although emotion complexity is associated with emotion regulation, it does not appear to be a key factor underlying age differences in emotion regulation.

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Notes

  1. It is important to note that such discrepancies do not appear to be the result of different methodologies. For instance Carstensen et al., (2000) and Grühn et al. (2011) both employed experience sampling protocols, yet their findings differ. Rather, Grühn et al.’s findings concur with those from Ong and Bergeman’s (2004) daily diary study, whereas Carstensen et al’s findings concur with the findings from Magai et al.’s (2006) emotion induction task.

  2. Based on the recommendations of a reviewer, we also examined whether computing the emotion differentiation scores via principal axis factor analysis, using the squared multiple correlations of the items as the starting value for the commonalities, would yield similar or different results. The two methods of computing the emotion differentiation scores were highly associated (r = 0.71, p < 0.001) and the overall findings were unchanged. Given this outcome and to permit the direct comparison of our findings with findings from previous studies, we decided to report the results based on the principal components approach.

  3. There is debate with respect to whether short-term fluctuations reflect true change as opposed to measurement error (cf., Eizenman et al. 1997). Research on daily emotions often treats any fluctuation as evidence of short-term change (see work on stress and daily emotions; e.g., Almeida et al. 2005; Bolger et al. 1989). To consider the possibility that small fluctuations could simply be measurement error, we re-estimated the conditional probabilities with the criterion that a person’s daily score needed to be at least half a within-person standard deviation above his or her mean to be categorized as being “above the mean” for that day. None of the findings changed when the conditional probabilities were adjusted in this manner.

  4. Block (1961) introduced his index as an indicator of self-concept differentiation (SCD). Given the accumulating empirical evidence that the SCD index is indicative of a fragmented and incoherent self-concept rather than a specialized self-concept, we prefer to use the term “self-concept incoherence” rather than the term “self-concept differentiation.”

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Acknowledgments

The research presented in this article was supported by grant R01 AG21147 from the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health.

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  1. Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Colorado State University, 1570 Campus Delivery, Fort Collins, CO, 80523-1570, USA

    Elizabeth L. Hay & Manfred Diehl

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  1. Elizabeth L. Hay
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Correspondence to Elizabeth L. Hay or Manfred Diehl.

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Responsible editor: D.J.H. Deeg

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Hay, E.L., Diehl, M. Emotion complexity and emotion regulation across adulthood. Eur J Ageing 8, 157–168 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10433-011-0191-7

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