Emotions and Aging

Emotional experience and regulation continue to change in a number of ways through adulthood. In many aspects, such changes appear to benefit emotional functioning. The aim of this article is to review the literature on adult development about emotion, including empirical findings and conceptual accounts of age differences in functioning. We focus on four aspects of emotional functioning: (1) subjective experience, (2) physiology, (3) behavioral expression, and (4) regulation. The discussion of theoretical mechanisms underlying age differences in emotion covers a range of different approaches, including biological, environmental, and motivational.