There is a surprising pattern in wellbeing as people age. Average life satisfaction is high at younger ages. It falls and reaches a minimum at about age 40, which is sometimes called the “midlife crisis”. It then increases year on year to the age of 65. It then plateaus until the age of 75. After that it declines. The same pattern has been found in many studies. (Newsletter # 140 “Do Apes Have a Midlife Crisis”)

Older people face many challenging life events. They do develop long term chronic diseases. They will lose friends and even spouses. They may have financial worries. How then does wellbeing remain strong and often above the level of the “midlife crisis”?

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory suggests why we would want to regulate our emotions. It suggests that as we age our mortality becomes more and more real. We change our motivations. We focus on growing our positive feelings. We engage the cognitive part of our brains in the task of regulating our emotions to be positive. As a result, there is a well proven positive bias in the way that older people assess situations. We will focus on the positive. After the event we recall the positives and forget the negatives. After bad illnesses the old are far more likely to forget the worst part and the pain.

A recent study illustrates this well. Older and younger groups were each shown happy and sad film clips. The sad films produced far more negative emotions amongst the young than the old. The happy films produced equal levels of positive emotions.

How do we regulate our emotions?

We all have to learn to manage emotions. As a child we must learn when and how to show our emotions. We have to learn when an emotion is appropriate. As an adult we must regulate our emotions when communicating with other people. Older people have much greater experience of the management of their emotions.

Older people can detect negative information just as well as younger adults. It is not the older people become impervious. The old and the young are as likely to find themselves in emotionally challenging situations. The difference is that they will deploy different regulation tactics. The simplest is “situation selection”. Older people will avoid negative situations when they see them. They will physically avoid confrontational situations or any with a negative connotation. They will leave someone else to do the complaining.

They can do the same thing mentally. “Attentional Deployment” is the strategy of only focusing on parts of the situation. Deliberately not seeing anything that would cause negative feelings. Famous studies showed this with photographs. Old and young groups were shown a selection of happy, neutral and sad photographs. The groups were asked to recall the pictures. The older group recalled far fewer of the sad pictures.

To regulate their emotions older people will “modify a situation” if they cannot avoid it. They will “defuse” a confrontation by changing the topic. They will recruit other people to a conversation to change the emphasis. The cognitive equivalent is “cognitive reappraisal”. We will reappraise a situation to change its meaning. “They did not really mean that…” “It doesn’t matter”.

The final strategy occurs when the situation has already occurred. It cannot be avoided or reappraised. The emotion is “on its way”. “Response modulation” is to change the feelings, behaviours and physiology. This is what we are taught when we are young. We must control our emotions.

It seems that the younger adults will use only the last strategy. Whether through experience, or need, older consumers are much more proactive in their approaches to emotional regulation. They use all five strategies.

Emotional Regulation Matters

Our emotions affect everything that we do. How we feel is transferred into how we evaluate everything. This is called emotional contagion. The film study went on to look at what happens to advertisements in sad or happy films. Do we evaluate them differently? Do old and young groups respond differently? It turns out that they do. A younger group will evaluate an ad more positively if it is embedded in a happy film. In a sad film the ad is evaluated more negatively. Older consumers are not influenced in the same way. Their emotional regulation stops the effect.

Suppressing negative thoughts can be an effective treatment for depression. A sense of wellbeing is important. All the studies show that wellbeing is associated with health and a long life. It is threatened by things beyond our control. Illness is the biggest threat. The onset of chronic illnesses in particular. They are incurable and will remain with us even if in remission. Regulating the rest of our lives is all we can do.