Long Island University-Brooklyn Campus Study Offers
Insights about Emotion Experience and Expression as We Age

Brooklyn, N.Y. – The ebb and flow of emotions has long perplexed poets and philosophers, but scientists also seek to understand human emotional variations. One focus of research in recent years has been on whether our emotions change with age.

Building upon the growing body of emotions research, investigators at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus, led by psychology professor and dean of research Carol Magai, examined age differences in people’s emotional complexity and emotion regulatory skills.

In their study of young, middle-aged, and older adults, they assessed experienced emotion and expressed emotion through subjective and objective measures. They conclude that the intensity of human emotion does not appear to subside over the adult years, and there are signs of greater emotional complexity and skill that come with the aging process.

“The subjective and expressive behavior of older adults was found to be more emotionally complex than younger adults—in all domains assessed,” said Magai, who is also the director of the Campus’s Intercultural Institute on Human Development and Aging.

Magai’s research is based on differential emotions theory, which states that there are fundamental human emotions, each having distinct properties. For example, shame will always be experienced as heightened awareness of the self and the desire to retreat from the view of others, anger will always be experienced as a forceful tendency to approach and challenge obstacles, and so forth. In addition, these emotions give rise to patterned facial expressions that are recognized universally.

In Magai’s study, 96 participants were divided equally across gender and race (white and African-American) and across three age groups: young (mean age, 23.1 years), middle-aged (46.5 years) and older (64.1 years). The experimental session consisted of participants reporting events in their lives that induced anger and sadness in them. Half of them were also asked to inhibit the behavioral display of emotion in recounting their emotional events.

 In addition to their own ratings of emotional experience, participants were rated based on an objective facial affect coding system; a content analysis also was applied to their emotion narratives.

Overall, the findings were generally consistent with differential emotions theory, but the results also indicated that the older people are, the greater is their ability to experience and communicate complex emotions and to tolerate ambiguity as well as to regulate their emotions. These skills are thought to be associated with lower defensiveness and greater psychological resilience.

Magai says, “The findings of the present study appear to index developmentally mediated skills acquisition—greater reflection, emergent complexity, valuation of emotional experience, and the protection of intimate relationships in later life and possibly of greater emotional control. Longitudinal work with more representative samples, already under way in several laboratories, will help clarify the picture.”

The results of the study, by Magai, N. S. Consedine, Y. S. Krivoshekova, E. Kudadgie-Gyamfi and R. McPherson, were published in the June issue of Psychology and Aging (21, 303-317), titled “Emotion experience and expression across the adult lifespan:  Insights from a multi-modal assessment study.” 

Long Island University opened its Brooklyn Campus in 1926, welcoming a diverse population at a time when other major universities enforced quota systems against racial and ethnic minorities. Located at the corner of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn, the Campus is accessible to all major bus and subway routes and the Long Island Rail Road.