The Impact of Experienced Emotion on Evaluative Judgments: The Effects of Age and Emotion Regulation Style

ABSTRACT

Adults aged from 24 to 79 were exposed to four commercial advertisements within the context of television programs designed to induce either a positive or negative mood. Although age was associated with memory for the content of the commercials, it did not moderate the impact of mood on evaluations of the advertized products. Instead, participants who reported engaging in expressive suppression as a common emotion regulation strategy were more likely to make evaluations that were biased by moods than those individuals who reported low use of this strategy. The results suggest that the maintenance of emotion regulation ability in later adulthood may help people control certain affective influences on thought.

Keywords:

• Aging
• Judgment
• Emotion regulation
• Mood Induction
• Evaluation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Steven Andrews, Hunter Davis, Liora Farber, Jessy Oxenberg, and Alexis Sutton for their assistance in conducting this research. We would also like to thank Daniel Grühn and Ute Kunzmann for their comments on previous versions of this manuscript. Support for this research was provided by grant AG05552 awarded to the senior author by the National Institute on Aging.

Notes

¹Although both videos contained some violence – in one case, of the comic variety – it was limited in duration to a few seconds in order to minimize responses specifically linked to violence (e.g., Bushman, 2005) and increase the probability that affective responses would relate to the targeted mood. The videos were otherwise similar in terms of number of both major scene transitions and primary characters.

²We tested for quadratic effects associated with age in all analyses in order to determine if any age effects might be disproportionately associated with the older end of our sample, but no significant effects involving this component were obtained.