Facing the Music or Burying Our Heads in the Sand?: Adaptive Emotion Regulation in Midlife and Late Life

Abstract

Defenses that keep threatening information out of awareness are posited to reduce anxiety at the cost of longer-term dysfunction. By contrast, socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that preference for positively-valenced information is a late-life manifestation of adaptive emotion regulation. Using longitudinal data on 61 men, we examined links between emotion regulation indices informed by these distinct conceptualizations: defenses in earlier adulthood and selective memory for positively-valenced images in late-life. Use of avoidant defenses in midlife predicted poorer memory for positive, negative, and neutral images nearly 4 decades later. Late-life satisfaction was positively linked with midlife engaging defenses but negatively linked at the trend level with concurrent positive memory bias.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The study was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (R01 MH042248) and the National Institute on Aging (R01 AG034554). We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Elizabeth Kensinger, Laura Carstensen, George Vaillant, and Derek Isaacowitz, whose advice contributed significantly to this project.