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Emotional Aging
Emotional aging is a fascinating field of research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience theoretically andfor its implications for affective wellbeing. Emotional aging presents as a “paradox of aging” since affective processing and emotion regulation have been found to stay intact despite the normal cognitive decline associated with aging. In old age processes of maintenance and compensation gain importance compared to growth and optimization. This is reflected in cognitive and emotional aging. Cognitive aging is characterized by decrement in physical and sensory abilities, decrement in executive functions. On the other hand, increasing age is associated with improvement in experience-based knowledge and improvement in emotion regulation. Previous studies showcased older adults with better memory for emotional information and more so for positive than negative information.

Emotional aging is an interesting phenomenon suggesting that as we grow old we have the capability to stay happier although older adults are generally believed to be sad and lonely. Research has examined the cognitive and neural mechanisms of emotional aging. However, the benefits of intact emotion regulation despite deficient cognitive abilities are yet to be explored in healthy aging as well as degenerative disorders associated with aging.

Defining Emotional Aging

Research shows that affective wellbeing does not decline with age. The trajectory of emotional aging is surprising that older adults have health issues; memory failures but they maintain positive wellbeing. Evidence suggests that older adults prioritize emotional goals and show early attention effects for positive affect and memory. This is also referred to as affective bias or positivity effect.

Theories
Emotional aging is explained in terms of many different theoretical perspectives discussed as follows:

1. The motivational life span perspective proposes that the emotional motivational goals shift across adulthood. The life span perspective refers to four key features that drive towards intact emotional aging: a) multidirectionality of development, which is to say that the development of different cognitive and affective processes may take different directions and trajectories. For instance development of certain cognitive abilities such as attentional control or memory may take a certain downhill trajectory whereas affect processing may take an uphill pattern of development with increasing age;b) plasticity: emotional aging is also explained in terms of change in structural and functional connectivity across cognitive and emotion regions for example the connectivity between amygdala and rostral anterior cingulate correlated with affective processing and regulation;c) contextual aspects including environmental factors, peer group, relationships, health care etc. also shape up the trajectory of aging influence emotion regulation in older adults; d) multiple causes including biological, psychological and sociocultural factors underlie intact emotion regulation despite cognitive difficulties. This includes opportunities available for older adults in a specific sociocultural context.

2. Social Emotional Selectivity Theory (SST)

This theory is an offshoot of the life span perspective and proposes that older adults focus on positive affective experience, remember positive or pleasant events faster and more accurately because they believe that limited time is left in life. . SST is one of the most prominent theories of emotional aging. Thus older adults selectively process positive information by engaging in mood enhancement goals and reduce their attention towards negative information. This approach also reflects in the choice of social relationships, social interactions and social partners making older adults more selective towards emotionally satisfying and positive interactions.

3. Dynamic Integration Theory

Decrement in cognitive capacities associated with age makes it more difficult to integrate and accept negative feelings, and therefore, older adults prefer affect optimization over affect complexity. Older adults process positive information more as it is easier and requires less attentional resources.

4. Discrete Emotion Theories perspective

This theory highlights the discrete effects of negative vs positive emotions and across different negative emotions. For instance, adolescents process anger more because they are more sensitive to salient and high arousing emotions like anger. The sensitivity to negative emotions decreases with age especially for salient high arousing emotions such as anger. On the other hand, older adults are likely to experience sadness more often and it has been found to help them to deal with losses and serves an adaptive function to facilitate their long-term wellbeing. The discrete emotion perspective proposes that different negative emotions may interact with effects of aging differently.

5. Long Term Experience

This theory posits that long terms experience and practice in dealing with emotional situations. Long-term use of strategies to regulate emotions adds to one’s experience in dealing with emotional information.In this process overtime emotion regulation may become less effortful.

Measures used to test emotional aging
1.	Dot probe task: This task aims to examine the detection of positive or negative affect compared to neutral stimuli. Faster detection of positive affect has been reported in older adults.

2.	Go no go task: This task is a measure of inhibitory control and has been used to measure the selective processing of emotion valence in terms of the motivational shifts related to approach (happy) and avoidance (anger/fear) emotions. Older adults show greater response inhibition for emotional stimuli on a go/no-go task compared to younger adults. They may also show faster reaction times on Go trials and less errors on no go trials for positive stimuli.

3.	Stroop task: FacewordStrooptask has been used to show faster conflict resolution (interference suppression) for emotional information in older adults.

4.	Memory for positive vs negative content words: Free recall tasks using positive and negative content words have been used to show better memory for positive words among older adults.

Neural Mechanisms
Structural preservation yet reduced responsivity of amygdala

Imaging studies suggest that there is less structural/volumetric decline with age in amygdala compared to other regions in the brain. Older adults also do not seem to suffer focal damage to amygdala. The structural preservation of amygdala supports the intact emotion processing with increasing age. However, age related differences in functional activations in amygdala have been reported.

The structural changes in emotion-sensitive regions and less autonomic responses may impair the processing for negative emotions with increasing age.However, amygdala volumes have been found to be less affected with age. Decline in amygdala responsivity to arousing stimuli has been reported in older adults. For instance higher reappraisal for negative stimuli resulted in reduced functional activation of amygdala. This does not show impaired functioning of amygdala rather reflects its efforts towards regulation. On the contrary, the aging brain model predicts decline in amygdala response due to aging, which is not supported well with evidence, which suggests that amygdala response in healthy older adults is same as younger adults.

Executive control network-amygdala connectivity

The cognitive control model explains this finding in terms of prefrontal emotional regulation,which diminishes amygdala response to negative but not to positive stimuli. Greater activations in prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate dampen the activation in amygdala in older adults to down regulate the negative emotions. In addition, increased functional connectivity in executive control network with emotional aging and decreased connectivity within the salience network also support these findings.

Implications
Emotion regulation strategies could be used to compensate for decline in attentional control. Use of motivational aspects like reward could aid in memory training in preclinical stages of dementia like mild cognitive impairment.Overall quality of affective experience steadily improves during adulthood and can be maintained into old age. More research is required to look at the benefits of emotional aging as a compensation for cognitive decline. Multiple theories have been proposed which provide motivation and experience based explanations of emotional aging. Cognitive and emotional aging also supports the notion that cognition and affect are integrated systems and influence each other, which is particularly beneficial for healthy aging.

Future directions
Further, studies could focus on the benefits of preserved emotion regulation on cognitive aging given that cognition and affect are integrated systems. More specifically, this field of research requires studies on neural and cognitive mechanisms of spontaneous and strategic emotion regulation with increasing age. A combination of time sensitive and space sensitive techniques with good temporal and spatial resolution are needed to explore these objectives. In addition, the intact emotion regulation strategies in terms of preference for positive information in older adults may be used in cognitive interventions designed for the elderly to enhance quality of life in old age. More research is required to investigate the interaction between affective wellbeing and its effect on cognition and the underlying neural plasticity involving cognitive-affective brain regions across life span.