A Discrete Emotions Perspective to Negative Autobiographical Recall among Younger and Older Adults

ABSTRACT

Background: The discrete emotions approach predicts differential relevance of anger and sadness experiences to well-being between younger and older adults (anger more relevant in young adulthood, sadness more relevant in old age).

Methods: We tested these assumptions within a semi-guided autobiographical recall task among a sample of younger and older adults. Participants recalled a series of 50 negative past life events that were categorized as to the primary emotion elicited. Phenomenological ratings included assessments of event negativity, positivity, vividness, and age at which the event occurred.

Results: Contrary to expectations, there were no age differences in the ratio of anger and sadness experiences, as well as perceived negativity and vividness. However, perceived positivity of sadness events was higher among older relative to younger adults.

Conclusion: We discuss the present results in terms of how various emotional events maintain their representational nature in old age, while certain events could be particularly unique to divergent age-related well-being outcomes.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Abishek Dey, Aryn Giffi, Miranda Mason, and Marie-Eve Lefebvre for help with data collection and data processing.

Notes

1. The larger study included participants coming back for a second experimental session whereby participants re-recalled 30 unpleasant and 5 neutral memories during an emotion regulation task. Here, participants recalled the unpleasant events in one of three regulation conditions (up-regulate negative, down-regulate negative, and remember naturally) so as to examine age-related differences in effectively modulating affective reactions to past life events.

2. Neutral memories were included so as to give participants a break from recalling several negative life events during the second experimental session for the larger study. These neutral events were to be generally benign (if even a bit pleasant) and describe everyday activities (i.e., recalling a recent errand, recalling the route the participant took to the laboratory session, etc.).

3. Prior to running these analyses, each DV was tested for outliers and violations of assumptions regarding normality and homogeneity of variance. Using Tukey box plots, several potential outliers were identified for the sadness positivity analyses; however, the results did not substantively change when excluding these cases. Thus, analyses with all available data are reported.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a faculty start-up grant from Cleveland State University.