The emotional response and regulation ability of older adults does not show degeneration with the decline of cognitive function. According to the socioemotional selectivity theory, the change of motivation makes older adults concern more about emotional pleasure. They are more sensitive to the positive emotional information consequently. Studies focused on emotional regulation ability of older adults usually used the explicit instructions to ask participant to suppress or amplify the emotional response. With more and more evidence of automatic emotion regulation coming out, the effect of automatic regulation was confirmed. For older adults, the accumulation of life experience make their emotion regulation behavior be more likely a form of automatic process. Unfortunately, there is no evidence to support this hypothesis yet. Researchers divided the process of automatic emotion regulation into two processes: implicitly represented ideas about emotion regulation and automatic emotion regulation. Based on this, Study 1 employed a sentence unscrambling task to prime the automatic regulation process. Both the subjective and physiological effects of automatic and effortful regulation were recorded during anger and amusement provocations in young and old participants. The results showed that the automatic and effortful regulations reduce the subjective experience and physiological reactivity the same way. There were no age differences in the ability to reappraisal in both automatic and effortful processes. Study 2 further contrasted the age difference of the cost of automatic and effortful processes, and found that automatic emotion regulation does not bring maladaptive subjective experience and physiological reactivity. The cost of automatic regulation towards negative emotion in older adults was less than that of young participants. Study 3 took implicit association test and the emotion regulation attitude questionnaire to inquire whether there is separation in the implicit and explicit attitudes of emotion regulation between old and young participants. It turned out that there was no difference on the explicit attitudes of emotional expression between old and young participants, while the old participants had more positive attitude of implicit emotional regulation. The findings suggest that automatic emotion regulation could provide an effective way of controlling both positive and negative emotion. Furthermore, automatic emotion regulation may have advantage for older adults when experiencing negative emotion.
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