Emotional processing in aging

Emotion conveys important social signals, motivates action, and rallies cognitive resources. These roles of emotion remain throughout the adult lifespan, despite some age-related differences in how adults experience and remember emotional content. This chapter first reviews the effects of aging on a person’s ability to recognize, express and regulate emotions. It then shifts to describing how aging affects a person’s ability to remember experiences that evoked an emotional reaction. Much of the work reviewed relies on extreme age-group designs, comparing young adults (typically, under the age of 35) to older adults (typically, 60+). In the final section, we note the importance for future work to clarify the developmental trajectory of emotion processing throughout the adult lifespan.