Older adults report surprisingly positive affective experience. The idea that older adults are better at emotion regulation has emerged as an intuitively appealing explanation for why they report such high levels of affective well-being despite other age-related declines. In this article, I review key theories and current evidence on age differences in the use and effectiveness of emotion-regulation strategies from a range of studies, including laboratory-based and experience sampling. These studies do not yet provide consistent evidence for age differences in emotion regulation and thus do not clearly support the assertion that older adults are better at emotion regulation. However, current approaches may be limited in describing and testing possible age-related changes in emotion regulation. Future work will need to more directly investigate individual trajectories of stability and change in emotion-regulation strategy use and effectiveness over time and also consider the possible roles of context, physiological reactivity, neural changes, acceptance, and personality.

老年人报告了令人惊讶的积极情感体验。老年人更善于情绪调节的想法已经成为一种直观的吸引人的解释，解释了为什么他们报告了如此高水平的情感幸福感，尽管其他与年龄相关的衰退。在这篇文章中，我回顾了一系列研究中关于情绪调节策略的使用和有效性的年龄差异的关键理论和当前证据，包括基于实验室的研究和经验抽样。这些研究还没有为情绪调节的年龄差异提供一致的证据，因此不能明确支持老年人更擅长情绪调节的说法。然而，目前的方法在描述和测试情绪调节中可能与年龄相关的变化方面可能受到限制。