title: Facing the Music or Burying Our Heads in the Sand?: Adaptive Emotion Regulation in Midlife and Late Life.
abstract: Defenses that keep threatening information out of awareness are posited to reduce anxiety at the cost of longer-term dysfunction. By contrast, socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that preference for positively-valenced information is a late-life manifestation of adaptive emotion regulation. Using longitudinal data on 61 men, we examined links between emotion regulation indices informed by these distinct conceptualizations: defenses in earlier adulthood and selective memory for positively-valenced images in late-life. Use of avoidant defenses in midlife predicted poorer memory for positive, negative, and neutral images nearly 4 decades later. Late-life satisfaction was positively linked with midlife engaging defenses but negatively linked at the trend level with concurrent positive memory bias.
authors.affiliation: Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School.
authors.forename: Robert J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Waldinger
authors.forename: Marc S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Schulz