Emotion in the Second Half of Life

Abstract

Research on aging has focused I primarily on the functional decline people experience as they grow old. Empirical evidence from mul tiple subdomains of psychology, most notably cognition, perception, and biological psychology, docu ments reduced efficiency, slowing, and decreased elasticity of basic mental and physical processes with age. Though findings are far more mixed in social aging research, there remains widespread, if tacit, sentiment that the task of geronto logical psychology is to assess the ways in which functional declines affect the life of the aging indi vidual. We assert that the focus on age related declines in human aging may have steered researchers away from certain questions that, when answered, would paint a more positive picture of old age. Specifi cally, we argue that changes in the emotion domain challenge models of aging as pervasive loss and point to one central area that is bet ter characterized by continued growth in the second half of life. We posit that old age is marked by greater saliency and improved regulation of emotions, and that emotional well-being, when it does suffer, declines only at the very end of life, when the cognitive and physical disabilities that often pre cede death in very old age over shadow previously vital areas of functioning (M.M. Baltes, 1998). These ideas are consistent with a

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