Aging and attention to self-selected emotional content: A novel application of mobile eye tracking to the study of emotion regulation in adulthood and old age

Previous studies of attentional deployment to a single stream of experimenter-selected affective stimuli have found that compared to younger adults, older adults attend relatively more to positive and less to negative stimuli, and this can relate to better mood for them. Past studies of situation selection have yielded a contrasting picture of age similarity. In everyday life, attentional deployment is fundamentally and dynamically related to situation selection, but prior studies have investigated them only in isolation. We present new research using mobile eye tracking to test for age differences in selections of emotional stimuli and attention to self-selected choices after a negative mood induction. Younger, middle-aged, and older individuals (N = 150) were either instructed to specifically try to regulate their mood state or not before having their selections, attention, and mood recorded. We used a database-oriented method to analyze fixations to positive, negative, and neutral videos once selected. Findings suggested more similarities than differences among age groups in what material was selected, how participants attended to selected material, and how their choices and attention predicted mood. Situation selection also had a more consistent relationship with mood than attentional deployment. These results suggest that age differences in attention are less apparent when participants have flexibility to avoid and choose stimuli than when viewing a predetermined fixed set of stimuli. Thus, emotion regulation strategies of selection and attention may show more age similarities when they interact than when studied in isolation.