Age similarities in matching pro- and contra-hedonic emotional strategies to everyday scenarios

ABSTRACT

Older adults are motivated to maximize positive affect in the present. Young adults will purposely feel negative and high arousal emotions in order to achieve a goal. However, this type of contra-hedonic emotional alignment has not been extensively studied with older adults. We expected older adults are less likely than young adults to select high arousal and negative emotions within specific scenarios where those states could be useful. In two studies, participants selected the emotion they preferred in hypothetical problems that varied on the arousal and valence best suited for goal achievement. Young and older adults were equally likely to endorse affective strategies that matched both pro and contra-hedonic scenarios. While older adults may be generally motivated to avoid negative and high-arousing emotions, they are just as likely as young adults to indicate that these states could be helpful in certain situations.

KEYWORDS:

• Aging
• emotion
• hedonic
• contra-hedonic
• individual differences

Acknowledgments

Preparation for this article was supported by internal faculty start up grants from Cleveland State University to ESA and from University of Akron to JTS. We would like to thank Matthew Cook, Sydney Cook, Katelyn DeCosta, Sabah Khalid, Miranda Mason, Christopher Mugnaini, Shannon Stack, & Michael Thutt for help with programming and data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Due to violations of the equality of variance assumption, the reported degrees of freedom and p value are from the equal variances not assumed test.