Emotion regulation across the lifespan: age differences in intrapersonal and interpersonal strategies for the adjustment to the COVID-19 pandemic in four countries

Abstract

Objectives

Studies have shown age differences in adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic. The processes explaining these age differences remain unclear. Intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation play an important role in psycho-social adjustment and develop across the lifespan. This study investigated whether differences in COVID-19-related adjustment disorder symptoms can be explained by age-differences in rumination in a multi-national sample. Furthermore, linguistic indicators of ruminative processing were examined with reference to age.

Methods

N = 1401 participants (from USA, UK, Switzerland, Germany, aged 18–88) completed an online survey and a writing task. Measures included brooding, co-brooding, adjustment disorder symptoms, and language indicators of negative self- and communal-focus .

Results

Older participants reported less adjustment disorder symptoms which was mediated by less (co-)brooding. Participants reporting more (co-)brooding wrote about COVID-19 more negatively. While in younger adults more self-focus was associated with higher ruminative brooding, in older adults it was associated with less brooding.

Conclusion

These findings contribute to a better understanding of regulatory mechanisms that help explain age differences in mental health. They warrant further research considering age-related differences, as our results suggest not only more adaptive emotion regulation as resilience factor in older individuals but also different qualities of self-focus while processing stressful events.

Keywords:

• Emotion regulation
• ruminative brooding
• linguistic markers
• interpersonal emotion regulation
• adjustment disorder
• COVID-19

Acknowledgements

We thank all our participants. We thank Michèle Campa for her support with the online survey. Data and R-codes are available upon request. This study was not preregistered. During her work on this project, Tabea Meier was a pre-doctoral fellow of LIFE (International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course; participating institutions: MPI for Human Development, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, University of Zurich.)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project ID: 196255).