Michael M. Shuster

Current Emotion Research in Developmental Psychology

Emotion theories based on research with adults must be able to accommodate developmental data if they are to be deemed satisfactory accounts of human emotion. Inspired in part by theory and research on adult emotion, developmentalists have investigated emotion-related processes including affect elicitation, internal and overtly observable emotion responding, emotion regulation, and understanding emotion in others. Many developmental studies parallel investigations conducted with adults. In this article, we review current theories of emotional development as well as research related to the several aspects of emotion designated above. Beyond providing an overview of the field, we hope to encourage greater cross-fertilization and research collaboration between developmental psychologists and scholars who focus on adult emotion.

Messages that matter: Age differences in affective responses to framed health messages.

Age differences in responses to framed health messages-which can influence judgments and decisions-are critical to understand yet relatively unexplored. Age-related emotional shifts toward positivity would be expected to differentially impact the affective responses of older and younger adults to framed messages. In this study, we measured the subjective and physiological affective responses of older and younger adults to gain- and loss-framed exercise promotion messages. Relative to older adults, younger adults exhibited greater negative reactivity to loss-framed health messages. These results suggest that health message framing does matter, but it depends on the age of the message recipient. (PsycINFO Database Record

The interpretative lenses of older adults are not rose-colored--just less dark: Aging and the interpretation of ambiguous scenarios.

We are all faced with ambiguous situations daily that we must interpret to make sense of the world. In such situations, do you wear rose-colored glasses and fill in blanks with positives, or do you wear dark glasses and fill in blanks with negatives? In the current study, we presented 32 older and 32 younger adults with a series of ambiguous scenarios and had them continue the stories. Older adults continued the scenarios with less negativity than younger adults, as measured by negative and positive emotion word use and by the coded overall emotional valence of each interpretation. These results illuminate an interpretative approach by older adults that favors less negative endings and that supports broader age-related positivity. In addition, older adults interpreted social scenarios with less emotionality than did younger adults. These findings uncover a new manifestation of age-related positivity in spontaneous speech generated in response to ambiguity, indicating that older adults tend to create emotional meaning differently from the young.

Aging, Emotion, and Decision Making

To best understand the role of emotion in decision-making across the adult life span, it is imperative to have a thorough grounding in judgment and decision making theoretical perspectives. Thus, we provide an overview of theoretical perspectives that emphasize the role of emotion in decision making including dual-process models, cognitive-experiential self-theory, and the affect heuristic. In applying these perspectives to the adult lifespan, we draw from lifespan theories of motivation. Given age-related declines in deliberative cognitive processes but enhancement in emotional processes, understanding the role of emotion in decision making in later life is paramount. In addition, findings are converging on a pattern in which an information-processing preference for negative information in youth shifts toward the positive in later life. This positivity effect plays an important role in decision making. Lastly, we consider how these findings apply to financial and health domains across the adult life span.

Emotion Socialization in the Family with an Emphasis on Culture

Cultural differences in emotion responding have been widely observed and must be incorporated into any comprehensive theory of human emotion. Socialization within the family is an important conduit th

Adult age differences in the interpretation of surprised facial expressions.

Research on adult age differences in the interpretation of facial expressions has yet to examine evaluations of surprised faces, which signal that an unexpected and ambiguous event has occurred in the expresser’s environment. The present study examined whether older and younger adults differed in their interpretations of the affective valence of surprised faces. Specifically, we examined older and younger participants’ evaluations of happy, angry, and surprised facial expressions. We predicted that, on the basis of age-related changes in the processing of emotional information, older adults would evaluate surprised faces more positively than would younger adults. The results indicated that older adults interpreted surprised faces more positively than did their younger counterparts. These findings reveal a novel age-related positivity effect in the interpretation of surprised faces, suggesting that older adults imbue ambiguous facial expressions—that is, expressions that lack either positive or negative facial actions—with positive meaning.

Children’s prototypic facial expressions during emotion-eliciting conversations with their mothers.

Despite theoretical claims that emotions are primarily communicated through prototypic facial expressions, empirical evidence is surprisingly scarce. This study aimed to (a) test whether children produced more components of a prototypic emotional facial expression during situations judged or self-reported to involve the corresponding emotion than situations involving other emotions (termed “intersituational specificity”), (b) test whether children produced more components of the prototypic expression corresponding to a situation’s judged or self-reported emotion than components of other emotional expressions (termed “intrasituational specificity”), and (c) examine coherence between children’s self-reported emotional experience and observers’ judgments of children’s emotions. One hundred and 20 children (ages 7–9) were video-recorded during a discussion with their mothers. Emotion ratings were obtained for children in 441 episodes. Children’s nonverbal behaviors were judged by observers and coded by FACS-trained researchers. Children’s self-reported emotion corresponded significantly to observers’ judgments of joy, anger, fear, and sadness but not surprise. Multilevel modeling results revealed that children produced joy facial expressions more in joy episodes than nonjoy episodes (supporting intersituational specificity for joy) and more joy and surprise expressions than other emotional expressions in joy and surprise episodes (supporting intrasituational specificity for joy and surprise). However, children produced anger, fear, and sadness expressions more in noncorresponding episodes and produced these expressions less than other expressions in corresponding episodes. Findings suggest that communication of negative emotion during social interactions—as indexed by agreement between self-report and observer judgments—may rely less on prototypic facial expressions than is often theoretically assumed.

Me Time, or We Time? Age Differences in Motivation for Exercise

Background and Objectives Increasing exercise continues to be an important health issue for both older and younger adults. Researchers have suggested several methods for increasing exercise motivation. Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) posits that peoples motivation shift from future-oriented instrumental goals to present-oriented emotionally meaningful goals as we age, which provides insight into how peoples motivations for exercise may differ for older versus younger adults. The aim of our study was to examine how exercise motivation differs for older versus younger adults. Research Design and Methods Older (greater than 59 years old) and younger (aged 18-26 years) adults participated in focus groups. They discussed exercise motivation (or lack thereof), motivators and barriers to exercise, and preferences about when, where, and with whom they exercise. Focus group transcripts were analyzed using direct content analysis and iterative categorization. Results Consistent with SST, younger adults generally preferred to exercise alone to achieve instrumental fitness goals, whereas older adults preferred to exercise with others. Additionally, older adults tend to consider peripheral others (e.g., strangers, acquaintances), as a positive rather than a negative influence. Discussion and Implications SST provides a framework for exploring age-related shifts in exercise motivation. Additionally, the positivity effect was reflected in how older adults evaluated the influence of peripheral others. Motivational messages could be tailored to increase health behavior changes by focusing on instrumental exercise goals for younger adults and exercise focused on meaningful relationships for older adults.

The sure thing: The role of integral affect in risky choice framing.

When faced with a decision, certain aspects of the decision itself shape our affective responses to choice options, which, in turn, influence our choices. These integral affective influences manifest as immediate feelings about choice options as well as the feelings that we anticipate we will feel after certain potential outcomes. We examined whether the effect of framing on risk taking can be explained through the mediating roles of immediate and anticipated affect. Two experiments were conducted using a gambling task. On each trial, participants were endowed a sum of money (e.g.,

Maternal cultural values and parenting practices: Longitudinal associations with Chinese adolescents' aggression

25) then presented with a choice between a sure option (leaving them with a portion of the initial endowment) and a gamble option (that could result in either keeping or losing the entire endowment). The sure option was framed differently across two within-participant conditions: as a gain (keep