Study shows older adults regulate negative feelings better

Abby Vogel
Research News

With age comes the ability to better regulate emotions to avoid disrupting performance on memory-intensive tasks, according to a study published in the March issue of the journal Psychology and Aging.

	Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology Chair Fredda Blanchard-Fields (left) and research assistant Daniel Pierce (center) ask study participant Mary Buchanan to fill out a questionnaire before beginning the trial.

The research study found that regulating emotions—such as reducing negative emotions or inhibiting unwanted thoughts—is a resource-demanding process that disrupts the ability of young adults to simultaneously or subsequently perform tasks.

“This study is among the first to demonstrate that the costs of emotion regulation vary across age groups,” said School of Psychology Chair Fredda Blanchard-Fields, the study’s lead author.

The study included 72 young adults who were 20 to 30 years old and 72 adults who were 60 to 75 years old. Funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), it was conducted by Blanchard-Fields and Susanne Scheibe, a former postdoctoral fellow at Tech, currently at Stanford University.

For the investigation, three-fourths of the participants watched a two-minute Fear Factor television clip depicting a woman eating something revolting in order to win money. The video was intended to induce a feeling of disgust in the participants. The remaining participants comprising the control group watched a two-minute clip of two men talking about a woman’s dress and subsequently sharing a beer in silence that was not intended to induce emotions.

After watching one of the videos, each participant played a computer memory game. For the task, a number—between zero and nine—appeared on a computer screen and each participant had to determine whether that number matched the number that appeared on the screen two numbers earlier. Twenty-two trials were presented before the task concluded and a combined performance score was computed.

“To compare the effect that a person’s emotion regulation strategies had on his or her performance at the working memory task, the participants who watched the disgust-inducing film were divided into three groups and given different emotion-regulatory instructions,” explained Blanchard-Fields.

The study showed that all of the participants performed better at the working memory task after watching the clip than before, likely due to the learning process. However, after being told to turn their disgust into positive feelings, the young adults performed significantly worse than the older adults in the memory task. Older adults who were given the same instructions continued to improve at the memory task.

“Older adults are so efficient at dealing with their emotions that it doesn’t cost them any decrease in performance, which is a really positive thing,” noted Blanchard-Fields.

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