AGING AND EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE: DYNAMICS OF POSITIVITY, NEGATIVITY, AND COMPLEXITY
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This article analyzes age-related characteristics of emotional experience across adulthood. The findings indicate that older adults experience positive emotions as frequently as younger individuals, whereas negative emotions occur significantly less often. In addition, emotional experience becomes more complex with age, and positive and negative states appear in more interconnected forms. The stability of emotional states also changes across age, with positive states tending to last longer and negative states dissipating more quickly. These results are interpreted within the framework of socioemotional selectivity theory and demonstrate that emotional functioning in later adulthood is both stable and increasingly complex.
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