Older Adults Suppress Emotion as Effectively as Young Adults But Only the Young Incur Memory Costs.

• ¹ Australian Catholic University, School of Psychology, Australia
• ² The University of Queensland, School of Psychology, Australia
• ³ University of Western Sydney, School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Australia
• ⁴ University of Otago, Psychology, New Zealand

The ability to influence ones facial expression of emotion, known as emotion regulation, is adaptive depending on the social context. Previous research indicates that older adults can suppress their emotional expression as well as young adults, and surprisingly, only for young does this suppression incur memory costs. Differential use of strategies was investigated by instructing participants (20 young and 20 older adults) to suppress their behavioural responses to positive and negative pictures. A watch only condition was compared with three regulatory suppression conditions (unspecified suppression, suppression of facial muscles, detached reappraisal). The novel use of electromyography (EMG) showed that both age groups were effectively able to suppress the intensity of their emotional expression back to level at resting baseline for each condition. Also, both groups were able to suppress their self-reported emotional experience for positive but not negative pictures. The young but not the older adults incurred costs as assessed comparing the amount of pictures recalled in the watch condition with the strategy conditions. There was no supporting evidence for the strategy selection explanation, with regulatory instruction making no differences to the measures of suppression, and the amount of emotional stimuli recalled. Interestingly, EMG also documented that compared to baseline recordings, the percentage increase of older adults' facial muscle activity in the watch condition was both substantially and consistently lower in emotional display relative to young adults. It was proposed that older adults do not experience memory costs during emotion regulation due to having much less facial reaction to suppress, and thus less mentally effortful, in the first place. Further research is needed with emotional stimuli that for young and old, produces low and high levels of the increase in the facial reactivity in the watch condition compared to base line.