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The Role of
Cognitive Control
in Older Adults’
Emotional
Well-Being
Nichole Kryla-Lighthall Mara Mather
Recently, the focus in gerontology has expanded from trying to avoid age-related decline to also trying to promote optimal aging. One key component of optimal aging is maintaining or even enhancing emotional well-being over the life span (Baltes & Baltes 1990; Lawton, 2001; Rowe & Kahn, 1987). The traditional stereo- type of old age depicts a period of evitable and continuous loss, with decreased subjective well-being. However, although negative life events tend to become more frequent and cognitive function and health tend to decline as people get older, emotional well-being does not appear to be compromised by the aging process. In fact, accumulating evidence indicates that healthy emotional aging— characterized by an overall enhancement of emotional experience across the life span—is part of normal human development (see Carstensen, Mikels, & Mather, 2006; Charles & Carstensen, 2007; Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999). Theories
In Berngtson, V., Gans, D., Putney, N., & Silverstein, M. (Eds.), Handbook of Theories of Aging, 2nd Edition, Springer Publishing, 323-344.
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of aging must explain this phenomenon. How is it that older adults have such emotionally gratifying lives in the face of significant losses? In this chapter, we attempt to explain the surprising robustness of emotional well-being in aging by integrating perspectives from cognition, emotion, and neuroscientific research. First, we review evidence that emotional well-being improves with age and discuss how age-related changes in goals motivate older adults to pursue emotionally gratifying experiences. Next, we present behav- ioral evidence that older adults use cognitive control to enhance their current emotional states. Then we use research findings from cognitive neuroscience to outline the requirements of implementing emotion regulation–focused strate- gies. We then evaluate older adults’ capacity to exert cognitive control given the trajectory of cognitive and brain function in aging. Finally, we present findings indicating that older adults use cognitive resources to regulate emotion. In this chapter, we argue that older adults use strategic control processes to achieve their emotional goals within the limitations of age-related changes to neural structures. The intersection of neurological function and affective goals in aging indicates that cognitive function—particularly executive function—is a critical factor in promoting emotional well-being in late life. Our theoretical framework emphasizes older adults’ power in determining their own emotional destiny. Cognitive control allows people to direct attention and memory in ways that help satisfy emotional needs. Using cognitive control as an emotion regu- lation tool becomes increasingly useful with advancing age as emotional well- being takes on more importance to those with more limited futures.
Improvements in Emotional Experience With Age
Studies reveal that negative affect decreases and positive affect increases or remains stable over the life course (for reviews, see Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999; Carstensen et al., 2006). From a clinical perspective, older adults have lower rates of subsyndromal depression, dysthymia, major depression, and anxiety disorders compared with younger adults (Bland, Orn, & Newman, 1988; George, Blazer, Winfield-Laird, Leaf, & Fischback, 1988; Jorm, 2000; Kobau, Safran, Zack, Moriarty, & Chapman, 2004; Weissman, Bruce, Leaf, Florio, & Holzer, 1991; Weissman, Leaf, Bruce, & Florio, 1988). This reduced prevalence of depression and anxiety among older adults signals a decrease in negative affect with age. One possibility is that emotional intensity decreases with age. Indeed, older adults show fewer physiological reactions than younger adults when reliving negative experiences (Levenson, Carstensen, Friesen, & Ekman, 1991) and less distress than younger adults after natural disasters (Phifer, 1990). Yet an overall reduction in experienced emotional intensity cannot explain the reduced rates of depression and anxiety in the aged, as the subjective experience of emotions does not decrease with age. Older adults report experiencing emotions with the same intensity as younger adults (Carstensen, Pasupathi, Mayr, & Nesselroade, 2000; Levenson et al., 1991; Magai, Consedine, Krivoshekova, Kudadjie-Gyamfi, & McPherson, 2006; Malatesta, Izard, Culver, & Nicolich, 1987; Mikels, Larkin, Reuter-Lorenz, & Cartensen, 2005; Tsai, Levenson, & Carstensen, 2000). One recent study even found that middle-aged and older adults had more intense subjective emotional experiences than younger adults, even though bodily
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adult development. According to the theory, the perception of time is a key element in determining human motivation (Carstensen et al., 1999; Lang & Carstensen, 2002). The theory posits that those who view their time remaining as unconstrained, such as younger adults, are motivated to invest in the future. Information-seeking goals are particularly salient to those who perceive time as unlimited because expanding one’s knowledge increases the chance of suc- cess in the future. As adults get older, however, accruing knowledge for future payoffs becomes less relevant. Those in late life benefit more from pursuing goals that provide immediate gratification; emotional goals serve this purpose. By emphasizing emotional well-being in the present, older adults optimize the time they have remaining. Thus, socioemotional selectivity theory proposes that people are motivated to pursue knowledge-seeking goals in early adulthood and transition to focusing on emotion regulation goals as they age. Research on social relationships across the life span supports the idea that emotional goals become more important with advancing age. Longitudinal data reveal that the amount of time spent with acquaintances and close friends declines during adulthood, while time spent with close family members—and one’s sense of emotional closeness with these social partners—increases with age (Carstensen, 1992). These changes suggest that young adulthood is a time for learning which people make the best social partners. Over time, social part- ners who provide the least emotional gratification are “pruned” to derive more emotional gains from social relationships. Even the oldest old—who experience the most death-related loss of loved ones—actively select and maintain intimate social relationships from their remaining social networks (Lang & Carstensen, 1994). Thus, the reduction in number of personal relationships in older age ap- pears to reflect the selection of social partners in the service of emotional goals. Further, when young adults’ futures are constrained by time experimentally or by circumstances that influence time perspectives, such as political upheaval or terminal illness, their desire to spend time with social partners that support emotional goals increases (Carstensen & Fredrickson, 1998; Fung, Carstensen, & Lutz, 1999). When describing their major life goals for the future, older adults empha- size goals that hold intrinsic meaning, such as creating meaningful relation- ships or contributing to society. Younger adults, on the other hand, describe life span goals that emphasize learning and taking on new challenges (Bauer & McAdams, 2004). Shifts in emotional goals with age are likewise represented by age differences in the qualities people expect in an ideal person. In their descriptions of an ideal person, middle-aged adults are more likely to include qualities such as being career oriented and enjoying life (i.e., productivity and pleasure), whereas those in old age are more likely to mention having a positive view about life and social relationships (i.e., enhancing feeling of life satisfac- tion; Ryff, 1989). This comparison supports the idea that active regulation of emotional experience—that is, putting a positive spin on one’s life experiences— becomes more important with advancing age. Evidence of a greater focus on active emotion regulation with age goes be- yond the social relationships literature. Many studies reveal that older adults have superior emotion regulation skills than younger adults do (Carstensen et al., 2000; Gross et al., 1997; Lawton, Kleban, Rajagopal, & Dean, 1992; Magai et al., 2006; McConatha, Leone, & Armstrong, 1997; Mroczek, 2001). To enhance
Chapter 18 The Role of Cognitive Control in Older Adults’ Emotional Well-Being 327
well-being, emotion regulation can be used to increase positive feelings (using up-regulation) or to decrease negative feelings (using down-regulation), and older adults demonstrate proficiency at both. For example, a recent study by Kliegel, Jäger, and Phillips (2007) shows that older people are more effective than younger people at “repairing” or down-regulating moods—restoring posi- tive affect after a negative mood induction. Older people are conscious of their emotion regulation ability, as they report greater control over their emotional states and mood stability than do younger people (Gross et al., 1997; Lawton et al., 1992). Older adults are more likely than younger adults to report controlling anger by using internal calming strategies (such as soothing oneself through self-talk; Phillips, Henry, Hosie, & Milne, 2006). In addition, older people report ruminating less about negative experiences (Mc- Conatha et al., 1997). Finally, from the coping literature, there are many studies demonstrating older adults experience less distress during difficult situations than do younger adults (see Charles & Carstensen, 2007). Thus, evidence indi- cates that individuals prioritize emotion regulation more as they age. It may be argued that older adults report better emotion regulation in order to conform to social expectations. Yet older people are more effective at regulat- ing anger than younger people even when social desirability is accounted for (Phillips et al., 2006). Along these lines, age-related emotion regulation gains lead to less intense negative emotions during interpersonal conflict (Birditt & Fingerman, 2003, 2005). Older adults are also capable of up-regulating emotions on command and show physiological profiles and subjective experience dem- onstrating they can enhance emotional experience as successfully as younger adults (Kunzmann, Kupperbusch, & Levenson, 2005). Taken together, this lit- erature indicates that the ability to consciously shape emotional responses to suit regulation goals is as effective, if not more effective, with advancing age.
Positivity in Older Adults’ Cognitive Processing
Cognition and emotions are inextricably linked—how we think influences how we feel and vice versa. For instance, cognitive processing can alter the quality of emotional experiences already in motion (Mauss, Cook, Cheng, & Gross, 2007; Ochsner & Gross, 2007; Pasupathi & Carstensen, 2003), effectively diminishing or intensifying those experiences. Given the power of cognition in determin- ing emotional outcomes, goal-directed cognition has been proposed as a tool for modifying affective experiences (Carstensen et al., 2006; Isaacowitz, 2006; Mather & Carstensen, 2005; Mather & Knight, 2005). Focusing cognitive re- sources on emotional goals offers a way to feel positive in the present. Cognitive strategies can be used to focus on positive and suppress negative information in order to enhance emotional well-being, leading to a “positivity effect” in atten- tion and memory (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005; Mather & Carstensen, 2005). We define the positivity effect as an age by valence interaction—such that a smaller proportion of older adults’ memory or processing time is devoted to negative stimuli than for younger adults and a larger proportion is devoted to positive stimuli than for younger adults. Indeed, numerous studies have revealed positivity effects in older adults’ cognitive processing (for reviews, see Carstensen et al., 2006; Mather, 2006;
Chapter 18 The Role of Cognitive Control in Older Adults’ Emotional Well-Being 329
adults are instructed to focus on emotional aspects of their decision making, they remember their past decisions more positively. In this study, older adults also showed a positivity bias, but they did so with or without external emo- tional cues. In another study, older and younger nuns recalled autobiographical memories first reported 14 years prior (Kennedy et al., 2004). The nuns were as- signed to one of three conditions: emotion focused, accuracy focused, or control. While accuracy-focused and younger control groups exhibited a negativity ef- fect in memory processing, emotion-focused and older control groups showed similar patterns of positivity in memory processing. Like the results from the decision-making study, these research findings suggest that emotion regulation goals are chronically activated in older adults leading to more positive cogni- tive processing, whereas emotion regulation goals can be activated in younger adults if they are given the right cues.
Behavioral Evidence of a Cognitive
Control Pathway to Well-Being
The findings presented so far suggest that older adults’ path to emotional well- being in aging begins with a change in time perspectives. As perceived time remaining shrinks, older adults seek to satisfy their emotional goals by regu- lating their affect, and the positivity effect in cognitive processing is a result of their emotion regulation efforts (Charles & Carstensen, 2007; Carstensen et al., 2006; Mather, 2004). This section presents evidence that successful emotion regulation depends on older adults’ active use of cognitive control strategies. That older adults use cognitive control to achieve well-being is supported by three lines of evidence: (a) older adults with better strategic processing abili- ties are more effective in regulating emotional states, (b) the presence of the positivity effect depends on cognitive processing constraints (i.e., positive bias occurs when circumstances allow for goal-directed processing), and (c) when cognitive resources are limited, older adults are more likely to exhibit a nega- tivity bias.
Executive Processing Abilities
As stated earlier, focusing on emotional goals during information processing requires cognitive control. In order to feel positive in the face of negative in- formation, several strategies can be implemented to direct affective outcomes. Gross (2001, 2002) outlines common strategies people use to down-regulate their affect when presented with negative material, including selecting a situ- ation by its expected emotional outcome, modifying the emotional impact or meaning of a situation, focusing on select aspects of a situation, and altering an ongoing emotional response. All these methods of controlling emotions re- quire self-initiated cognitive processing—in other words, executive functioning. As emotion regulation requires cognitive control, those with superior executive functioning should be better at achieving emotional goals through the use of cognitive control strategies. To test this proposition, Mather and Knight (2005) measured executive function (specifically self-initiated processing dependent on the prefrontal brain region) in older and younger adults to see if better
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cognitive control abilities predicted enhanced positivity in emotional memory processing. The executive function battery included measures to assess selec- tive attention (Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz, & Posner, 2002), working memory (Baddeley, Logie, & Nimmo-Smith, 1985), and the ability to refresh recently ac- tivated representations (Johnson, Mitchell, Raye, & Greene, 2004). The study revealed that, while older adults remembered more positive than negative in- formation compared with younger adults overall, the older adults with the best performance on cognitive control tasks were the ones most likely to express the positivity effect. Further, those older adults with low cognitive control abili- ties had negatively biased memories. Some have proposed that older adults are more likely to “gate out” negative affect when they have low cognitive control abilities (e.g., Labouvie-Vief, 2005). On the contrary, this section indicates that those older people with the best cognitive control function are the most posi- tively biased—remembering less negative and more positive information than their lower-functioning counterparts. Indeed, the way that adults make choices with advancing age provides fur- ther support for the idea that high-functioning older adults use their executive processing resources to enhance well-being. A recent study by Mather, Knight, and McCaffrey (2005) found that, when deciding between two options, older adults with better performance on tasks measuring executive functioning made decisions based on alignable features (features comparable across choices) and had better memory accuracy for alignable features than for nonalignable fea- tures. Focusing on alignable features allows people to avoid regret (and thus negative affect) when making choices, as this decision strategy requires fewer trade-offs than whole-option comparisons (Luce, Bettman, & Payne, 1997). Younger adults with high executive functioning, on the other hand, were less likely to use feature-based comparisons. This makes sense given that avoiding regret is not a priority for the young. Conversely, older adults have a greater motivation to maintain well-being in the present than do younger adults; thus, we propose that cognitive control resources are increasingly allocated for enhancing emotional well-being with advancing age.
Cognitive Processing Constraints
Our cognitive control framework of aging and emotional well-being posits that older adults will experience emotional enhancement to the extent that they are capable of exerting cognitive control. We have provided evidence that older adults with better executive function are more successful at creating posi- tive cognition via goal-directed processing. However, regulating emotions re- quires considerable cognitive effort, even for younger adults (Ochsner et al., 2004). Controlling emotions, whether attempting to amplify or decrease emo- tional experiences, requires increased neural activation in executive function regions of the brain including the prefrontal cortex. Given that the prefrontal cortex—which is largely responsible for self-initiated cognitive processing— deteriorates significantly with advancing age (Greenwood, 2000; West, 1996), regulating emotional states using effortful control strategies may be more resource demanding for older people than for younger people. Thus, older adults may need to compensate for age-related neural deficits by recruiting more cognitive resources in their emotion regulation efforts. Additionally, even
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Further support for this proposition comes from a study conducted by Knight et al. (2007) in which younger and old adults’ visual attention for pairs of emotional and neutral scenes and faces was monitored using eye tracking. Visual gaze was monitored under either full- or divided-attention conditions. Similar to the memory findings of Mather and Knight (2005), older adults in the eye-tracking study showed a positivity bias in visual attention when they were allowed to devote full attention to the pictures but a negativity bias when they were forced to complete another goal-irrelevant task simultaneously. Thus, when cognitive resources are limited, older adults are not able to implement emotional goals effectively. Context can also limit access to cognitive resources. In another study, married couples reported on marital satisfaction in general (via mailed questionnaire) and under controlled conditions (in a lab while com- pleting a conversation protocol; Henry, Berg, Smith, & Florsheim, 2007). Older married couples reported greater martial satisfaction than middle-aged couples in general, and the increase in satisfaction was explained by older adults’ more positive perception of their spouses. In contrast, when couples were asked to evaluate their spouses’ behavior during an experimentally controlled conver- sation in a lab (including an experimenter selected topic and regimented turn taking), there were no age differences in the number of negative character- istics attributed to spousal interactions. The laboratory experiment had more constraints than the overall evaluation of spousal satisfaction, and it is pos- sible that this reduced older adults’ ability to engage in regulatory processing when making emotional judgments about their partners. These studies suggest that well-being in the elderly is influenced by contextual demands on cognitive processing—only when situations allow for the implementation of control strat- egies can the well-being of older adults be enhanced by cognitive control.
Resource Limitation-Related Negativity
This chapter has cited many studies finding the positivity effect in older adults’ processing, and the review indicates that older people control their pro- cessing using effortful strategies. However, older adults do not always have access to sufficient cognitive resources for emotional goal implementation (e.g., when multitasking as described previously). Interestingly, when older adults’ cognitive resources are constrained, they sometimes show a negativity bias in information processing. Unlike older control participants, older adults in divided- attention conditions are negatively biased when processing emotional mate- rial in memory and visual attention tasks (Knight et al., 2007; Mather & Knight, 2005). This seems perplexing. Why should older adults focus on negative infor- mation more when their access to cognitive resources is limited? In his theory of ironic processes of mental control, Wegner (1994) proposes that when people try to control their cognition, they must initiate two processes: an operating process that searches for information consistent with goals and a monitoring process that searches for evidence that goal implementation has failed. Wegner’s theory maintains that the operating process is more resource intensive than the fail- ure monitoring process. Thus, if self-initiated control is used to create a desired mental state, encountering cognitive resource limitations can compromise the processing of goal-consistent information while allowing goal-inconsistent ma- terial (i.e., negative information) to get through. Applying this theory to our
Chapter 18 The Role of Cognitive Control in Older Adults’ Emotional Well-Being 333
research, we expect that older adults’ emotion regulation strategies can backfire as cognitive loads increase. Given this expectation, the observation that older adults show a negativity bias when they are distracted but not when they can devote their full attention to processing information is consistent with the no- tion that they are, in fact, attempting to implement emotional goals by using cognitive control strategies.
Neuroscientific Evidence of a Cognitive
Control Pathway to Well-Being
Socioemotional selectivity theory has contributed greatly to our understanding of human development and the trajectory of emotional well-being throughout the life span. Elaborating on Carstensen’s socioemotional selectivity theory, our cognitive control framework of aging and emotional well-being attempts to explain—from a neurocognitive perspective— how older adults direct their emotional states to align with their emotional goals using cognitive processing. Thus far, we have considered the behavioral evidence supporting the proposal that cognitive control influences well-being in the elderly, but we must also consider findings from cognitive neuroscience in order to determine if adults have the functional capacity to implement control strategies in late life. To accomplish this, we must determine the neurological functioning require- ments for regulating emotions through controlled processing, and we must demonstrate that older adults have these functional resources intact.
Neurofunctional Requirements
Controlling emotions through cognitive processing requires the appraisal of af- fective information (Ochsner & Gross, 2004) and the alignment of cognition with emotional goals (Mather & Carstensen, 2005; Mather & Knight, 2005). These two criteria require cognitive processes dependent on the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate (see Davidson, Jackson, & Kalin, 2000; Kim & Hamann, 2007; Knight & Mather, 2006; Ochsner & Gross, 2007). The amygdala is responsible for appraising the affective quality of informa- tion (for review, see Lane & Nadel, 2000). This type of processing is often referred to as a “bottom-up” processing, as it is reactive and automatic (Ochsner & Gross, 2007). The amygdala is especially useful in detecting emotionally intense mate- rial (Anderson, Christoff, Panitz, De Rosa, & Gabrieli, 2003; Cunningham, Raye, & Johnson, 2005; Dolcos, LaBar, & Cabeza, 2005; Kensinger & Corkin, 2004) and providing rapid responses to emotional information (Grieve, Clark, Williams, Peduto, & Gordon, 2005; Mu, Xie, Wen, Weng, & Shuyun, 1999). The amygdala is necessary for implementing emotion regulation strategies because the af- fective value of information must be known before goal-directed processing can take place. For example, if you are watching a horror film but want to avoid feeling disgusted during the gruesome scenes, you can use distracting thoughts to reduce emotional engagement in those scenes. However, you must recognize when those gruesome scenes occur so that you can quickly initiate and termi- nate your emotion regulation strategy without missing too much of the movie.
Chapter 18 The Role of Cognitive Control in Older Adults’ Emotional Well-Being 335
with age. For example, the prefrontal cortex is subject to more atrophy than other brain regions (Coffey et al., 1992; Raz, 2000; Resnick, Pham, Kraut, Zon- derman, & Davatzikos, 2003) with the lateral prefrontal cortex encountering the greatest decline of any prefrontal subregion (Tisserand et al., 2002). Further- more, findings from positron-emission tomography reveal age-related declines in glucose metabolism in frontal brain regions (Mielke et al., 1998). Other emo- tion regulation structures also show pronounced deterioration with advancing age. Cross-sectional and longitudinal imaging data reveal significant brain at- rophy in the anterior cingulate in older adults, even within a 4-year time span (Good et al., 2001; Resnick et al., 2003). On the other hand, the amygdala is well maintained in aging compared with most other brain regions (Grieve et al., 2005; Mather, 2004; Mu et al., 1999). Thus, age-related changes to emotion pro- cessing structures appear to negatively impact those responsible for emotion control while leaving the amygdala more or less intact. Despite the age-associated decline in cognitive control abilities and emo- tion control–related neural structures, regulation of emotion and social behav- ior (associated with the frontal lobe) functions well in older age (for review, see Mather, 2004). Recent functional imaging research supports the idea that older adults spontaneously recruit additional cognitive resources to meet their processing needs and are more successful at achieving their cognitive goals when they do so. For instance, older adults’ memory processing abilities are challenged when distractors are present, as inhibiting goal-irrelevant informa- tion becomes more difficult with age (Earles, Smith, & Park, 1994). Yet Gutchess et al. (2007) found that when high-functioning older adults complete a recogni- tion task while distracted, they recruit unique neural regions and have better memory performance than do low-functioning elders. It seems that while older adults may experience significant age-related losses to cognitive control struc- tures, they can compensate for their losses by exerting more cognitive effort. In sum, evidence presented so far indicates that the primary affective ap- praisal structure (amygdala) remains stable while emotion control regions de- cline with age. Yet even with age-related deterioration to regulation structures, healthy older adults can promote their emotional well-being by recruiting addi- tional cognitive resources to implement their regulation goals. Age differences in neural activation during emotion processing provide further support for this proposition.
Functional Evidence of Goal-Directed Emotion
Processing in the Elderly
Older adults report experiencing negative emotions less frequently than do younger adults (Birditt, Fingerman, & Almeida, 2005; Carstensen et al., 2000; Diehl & Hay, 2007; Gross et al., 1997; Mroczek & Kolarz, 1998). These self-reports are supported by functional imaging studies finding that older adults have less brain activation in response to negative information than do younger adults (Mather et al., 2004; Samanez-Larkin et al., 2007). Older adults’ reduced brain activation in response to negative information does not appear to reflect de- clines in emotion detection structures or function (see Knight & Mather, 2006), as the ability to detect emotionally arousing stimuli more quickly than other stimuli is preserved in older age (Hahn et al., 2006; Knight et al., 2007; Mather &
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Knight, 2006). Instead, older adults’ reduced brain activation for negative mate- rial is consistent with the notion that older people apply cognitive control when attempting to reduce negative emotional experiences. Our theoretical frame- work predicts that if older adults use cognitive control to achieve well-being, they may have amygdala responses equal to younger adults in early emotion processing but more reappraisals and inhibition of amygdala responses when the experienced affective information is negative. On the other hand, when older adults encounter positive information, other prefrontal regions respon- sible for maintaining information should be more active (such as dorsolateral prefrontal regions associated with working memory). These predictions for negative stimuli are supported by functional resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments comparing brain activation in younger and older adults while they view faces with emotional and neutral expressions. Evidence from these studies indicates that age is associated with reduced amygdala acti- vation in response to negative information (Fischer et al., 2005; Gunning-Dixon et al., 2003; Iidaka et al., 2002; Keightley, Chiew, Winocur, & Grady, 2007; Mather et al., 2004; Tessitore et al., 2005). Another study, using event-related potential recording (ERP), found that older age was related to an elimination of the nega- tivity bias in brain activation frequently observed in younger adults (Wood & Kisley, 2006). In addition, fMRI studies find evidence that dampened amygdala response to negative material in older people coincides with an enhanced activation in the anterior cingulate cortex (Gunning-Dixon et al., 2003; Iidaka et al., 2002) and the prefrontal cortex (Fischer et al., 2005; Gunning-Dixon et al., 2003; Tessitore et al., 2005). Furthermore, a study that measured brain activity in response to positive and negative faces using ERP in 252 participants and fMRI in a subset of 80 of these participants found that activation in the medial prefrontal cortex during viewing of fearful faces increased with age, whereas activation in the same region during viewing of happy faces decreased with age (Williams et al., 2006). These imaging findings support our hypothesis that emotion regulation structures responsible for inhibiting or reappraising infor- mation will activate when older people encounter negative information but not positive information. In addition, Mather et al. (2004) found that older adults but not younger adults experienced greater amygdala activation in response to positive pictures compared to negative pictures. We interpret these findings as evidence that older adults use cognitive control to diminish their negative emo- tional experiences but not their positive emotional experiences. While older adults may be grouped together for research purposes, they are by no means homogeneous. Widely variable experiences, health, and function- ing lead to increased diversity in late life. As outlined previously, we predict that differences in cognitive function among older people will relate to variability in emotional well-being, as access to cognitive resources allows older people to direct information processing toward emotional goals. Behavioral evidence presented earlier demonstrated an enhanced positivity effect in older people with higher cognitive control abilities (Mather & Knight, 2005; Mather et al., 2005). Applied to the neural correlates of emotional control, we predict that older adults will enlist cognitive resources, supported by prefrontal regions, to down-regulate emotional experience when they are confronted with negative information. If this is the case, older adults’ prefrontal function should predict their success at down-regulating negative affect. One research team has found
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likely to set challenging goals for themselves and experience enhanced grati- fication from doing cognitive tasks (West, Thorn, & Bagwell, 2003). In addition, higher levels of emotional well-being predict more gradual decline in perceptual speed (Gerstorf, Lövdén, Röcke, Smith, & Lindenberger, 2007). Finally, maintain- ing a focus on emotional well-being can produce gains in physical health by reducing physiological symptoms of stress (Urry et al., 2006). Thus, it is likely that emotional well-being and cognitive function affect each other in a feedback loop wherein enhanced well-being leads to greater cognitive engagement and better health, in turn promoting greater life satisfaction (Rowe & Kahn, 1997). Our framework linking cognitive control and well-being reflects the changing tenor in the field of aging—from evitable decline to new opportunities.
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