Negative Emotions in Old Adults
Introduction
It is not clear why older adults are more sensitive to negative information than younger adults. Numerous studies state that, emotion regulation increases as people age. The main focus of this proposal is to examine emotional differences between older and younger adults with regards to novel and non-novel emotional experiences. It’s not only a matter of age, but also memory and attention. It is evident that memory and attention are two factors in emotion regulation and both change with age. Attention and perception are the initial stages of stimulus processing, which include factors that influence downstream cognitive functions, such as memory and reasoning (Phelps, 2006). Therefore, an older participant will have more sad reactions than the younger ones because they have a greater reserve of knowledge about the event. To examine this, a case study was conducted. Methods of conducting the study include Eye tracking technologies, different pictures as stimuli as well as questionnaires as important tools to measure the participants’ emotion. Emotion regulation, memory, attention, and event perception and relevance are the important areas of focus that will be addressed in the study.
Emotion regulation is not always an easy task
As people grow old, their body health worsens thus becoming weaker, they also tend to experience negative predicaments beyond their control such as the death of loved ones or diseases in extreme cases. Increased exposure to such losses may sensitize older adults to loss-related issues, increasing sadness reactivity to events involving loss (Seider, Shiota, Whalen, & Levenson, 2010). With increased experiences of this kind of information, they became pointlessness i...
... middle of paper ...
...ainly focused on a population full of healthy young and old adults rather than including those with good and poor health and also those who are uneducated. Future studies should include all the categories for more accurate results.
Conclusions
Older adults tend to react negatively to information which has a negative emotional impact on them, more so they forget easily to the same information (Brien, 2006). This is because adults have a different mental focus, this emphasizes mostly on emotional meaningful rather than any other reward. Young adults have recorded an improvement in controlling their negative emotions and their
NEGATIVE EMOTIONS IN OLD ADULTS12 avoidance to encode negative emotional contents. With such results, information with positive emotional relevance will continue to prosper while negative emotional information will continue diminishing as it ages.
The aim of the study was to examine the relationship between attitudes about aging and aging anxiety. The focus of the study was to determine the role that aging anxiety plays a mediator between experiences. The experiences focused on were in the form of factual knowledge and contact with the elderly.
As we grow old we learn numerous different things. Laura Carstensen, a professor of psychology at Stanford University published a study where she showed older people tend to be happier. In her TED presentation titled “Older People Are Happier”, Carstensen shows research that demonstrates that as people get older they become happier, more content, and have a more positive outlook on the world. Carstensen also mentions in her presentation that in her experiment she showed some happy and distressing photos to young and older volunteers. The brains of older subjects reacted much more strongly to positive photos and conveniently were unable to remember having seen some of the distressing pictures (Carstensen 2011). Carstensen mentions as we grow older our brains tend to keep good-memories and ignore bad ones.
Avoidance behaviors are generally driven by catastrophic hypotheses . By engaging in the avoidance behavior we get immediate relief from the distress because we avoid whatever catastrophic event we believe may happen if we were to confront or face the situation- this is the hook. In avoiding the situation we rob ourselves of the opportunity to test the hypothesis. Because negative thinking surrounds the situation we are seeking to avoid, our beliefs about the situation become more catastrophic as more time passes between the present and our last successful exposure to the situation. This increases the likelihood that we accept the hypothesis as fact without evidence.
It is said to remain more stable throughout aging. Another is fluid intelligence, which measured working memory such as speed and time, but known to decline as age increases. On the other hand, Atchley (1989), Continuity theory, was based on the premise of one 's sense of identity which was influenced by how they viewed themselves both internally and externally (Gamst, Der-Karabetian & 2008). Its constructs focused on the individual’s inner strength that was influenced by their past and societal structures such as culture, family and in the process helped to form internal identity. What the authors made aware that, even though older adults may be from different cultures or environments, they remain the same fundamentally across life span. Therefore, using an approach that would not only provide a framework for intervention, but can help to understand what factors contributed to the aging
Children are extremely susceptible to recalling false memories due to suggestive questioning (Quas et al., 1999). Therefore, it is very important that the most accurate testimony is retrieved from the child, and this can be done through emotional focusing. It has been found that emotional focusing increases autobiographical memory, meaning that the more emotionally focused the child is, the better they remember events from their own life (Drummond, Dritschel, Astell, O’Carroll, & Dalgleish 2006). In one study, children were taken to a pretend zoo and reminisced about their experience two days later. They found that children who reminisced about emotions recalled more information about the tr...
Adults entering the midlife years (middle adulthood) are experiencing an overabundance of life changes. Hall, Hernandez, Wong, and Justice (2015) stated that, during middle adulthood important changes occur across the physical, cognitive, and social domains of development. There is a mounting amount of research on the changes that middle-aged adults experience. One of the most unexplored factor that middle-aged adults experience is Ageism. Ageism can be defined as the act of being prejudice or discriminative towards a specific age group. Although, Ageism can occur at any given place and in any age group. Research shows that it is more prevalent in older adults,
Aging and old age for a long time presented as dominated by negative traits and states such as sickness, depression and isolation. The aging process is not simply senescence most people over the age of 65 are not Senile, bedridden, isolated, or suicidal (Aldwin & Levenson, 1994). This change in perspective led the investigation of the other side of the coin. Ageing is seen as health, maturity and personal Royal growth, self-acceptance, happiness, generatively, coping and acceptance of age-related constraints (Birren & Fisher, 1995). Psychological und...
Further studies from Zhou (2012) looked at nostalgia’s effect as a homeostatic role along with the psychological benefits mentioned above. Their results from a set of conducted studies showed that:
Younger people have tended to look towards the elderly for wisdom and guidance since the beginning of recorded history and beyond. Students to teachers, children to parents, ordinary people to royalty and politicians – generally those who have lived longer are not only believed, but expected to have garnered more knowledge in their longer lives. Abraham Lincoln once said, “I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday. Also, in 2008 the Australian newspaper published an article detailing a study undertaken by the University of Aarhus in Denmark, which disproved the theory that the mind is at its peak in the late teens to mid-twenties. But all this is not to say that older people should not sometimes listen to and heed advice from younger people.
emotions are, what comprises emotions and where they spring from. Most of the times we
looking forward style of thinking and allows the older adult to even re-evaluate events from the
A situation that includes the immense mental contribution in pleasure or displeasure is termed as emotional. Emotion is an experience that happens when one is actively involving their cognition. Science has its definition of what feeling is thus making the term enormous with at least one meaning. Factors that contribute to emotions are things like mood, motivation, disposition, and personality. Some theories about feelings hold cognition to be a crucial factor. People who operate under emotions are termed as fewer thinkers, though the brain is usually at work (Brown, Stephanie, & Micheal, 17). Emotions are sophisticated in all cases. Components involved in emotions
Daniel Goleman, who help to popularize emotional intelligence explained in his book that the success of a person does not depend on our academic studies or the intellect, if not the emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the ability or gift of being able to control, identify, and understand feelings and emotions correctly in a way that facilitates relationships and makes them more productive; We are not born with emotional intelligence, we can only create, nurture, and strengthen through our experiences and knowledge. There are positive and negative emotions they can help or cause problems, depends on the ability to handle them. People with high emotional intelligence doesn’t mean that you have negative emotions, but when they
The present paper illustrates my reflections regarding the article “Memory and Aging: Selected Research Directions and Application Issues”, the third lecture “Psychosocial Issues”, and our class discussion. All of them brought up important issues regarding the psychological health of older adults, however, one theme was common across them: the role of social interaction on cognition and emotion.
I believe that happiness is the key to living a good and prosperous life. Through all of the sadness and hate in the world, happiness gives me hope. It gives not only me, but others hope and joy. Happiness gives us something to hold onto, therefore we cherish it as much as we can.