Situation selection across adulthood: the role of arousal

ABSTRACT

In this study, we investigated age differences in situation selection to understand the role stimulus arousal plays in motivating age differences in this type of emotion regulation. Participants freely selected from a set of affective videos using information about the valence and arousal of each stimulus. There were age differences both in the valence and arousal of selected stimuli. Older adults selected more neutral and low-arousal stimuli while younger adults selected more negative and high-arousal stimuli. We consider these results in light of recent theoretical models and conclude that studies of age differences in emotion regulation must consider both valence and arousal.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion regulation
• aging
• situation selection
• affect
• arousal

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Kimberly M. Livingstone for her statistical assistance and feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. These exclusion criteria were used because we also recorded physiological responses in the current study (e.g. electrocardiogram, impedance cardiography, and electrodermal activity). However, the physiological data are not included in the current paper.

2. Participants who provided normative ratings were younger (M_age = 18.31, SD = .70, n = 16) and older adults (M_age = 74.20, SD = 10.86, n = 10). Valence, arousal, and relevance ratings were standardised within age group. Independent samples t-tests determined if they differed by age group. Video clips were only included if there were no significant age differences in the ratings, all ps > .125 (see Supplementary Materials).

3. The instructions and parameters of the affective environment paradigm differ somewhat from prior affective environment studies conducted in our lab (e.g. Rovenpor et al., 2013). Participants in this study were explicitly given information about the valence and arousal of each stimulus to make differences in affective content more salient to participants (and so participants could incorporate arousal information in their decision-making, which would not be as apparent as valence from titles/thumbnails alone). The valence order of the computer monitors was counterbalanced across participants. Additionally, there was the same amount of stimuli of each valence unlike prior studies.

4. We conducted a second study examining participants' reactions to identical affective stimuli when situation selection was not available as an emotion regulation strategy. We compared between the two studies to better understand the effectiveness of situation selection by disentangling the effects of actively making a choice from intrinsic properties of the stimuli (i.e. watching them but not choosing them). Interestingly, there were no differences in subjective affective experience between the two paradigms. Participants in both studies reported feeling equally unpleasant after engaging with negative emotional content, and feeling equally pleasant after engaging with positive emotional content regardless of if they had selected it or not, F(1, 81) = .04, p = .84. The magnitude of arousal ratings was also not impacted by the ability to select the situation, F(1, 93) = .29, p = .59.