Exercise for 28 November 2018Note: Try to summarize the following paragraphs below individually and then try to come up with a single line summary/title for the extract. I strongly encourage you to do this exercise mentally - without writing the summaries anywhere. Once done, type your summary/title below and read the article and it's title and match the article's summary with yours. Both the summaries should be close enough. Try to time yourself - take no more than 3 minutes to complete this activity.Sample:OLDER people are often perceived as lonely, hopeless, and sad. Even older adults who report high levels of satisfaction frequently express beliefs that most other older people are not faring well. In the last decade, however, research has shown that such negative views are unwarranted. Although many people are, indeed, facing mounting physical ailments, psychological stress, social losses, and increased dependency at the very end of life, most older people are well adjusted emotionally for the bulk of their later years (e.g., Carstensen, Pasupathi, Mayr, & Nesselroade, 2000). Naturally, individual differences are apparent: Improvements to well-being are general trends, not guarantees. Dispositional tendencies, life events, and individuals’ management of such events can all influence whether well-being improves or deteriorates with age. Nevertheless, research suggests that reasonably high levels of affective well-being and emotional stability are the norm rather than the exception at least until after adults reach 70 or 80 years of age (e.g., Carstensen et al., 2000, 2009; Charles, Reynolds, & Gatz, 2001; Kessler & Staudinger, 2009; Kunzmann, Little, & Smith, 2000; Mroczek & Kolarz, 1998; Teachman, 2006). Only when people are essentially dying does “terminal” drop in affective well-being appear consistently and is largely independent of age.
At first sight, the trajectory of emotional aging may appear surprising. Given that older adults are confronted with bodily deterioration, increasingly frequent health problems and memory failures, and losses in mobility and in the social worlds, how do people maintain high levels of affective well-being? One possible explanation, which has recently received much attention, is an increasing motivation to regulate emotional states and increasing competence to do so (Blanchard-Fields, 2007; Carstensen, 2006). Subsequently, we review recent frontiers in the quest for understanding emotional processing and emotional regulation as determinants of positive affective change with age. We start by outlining theoretical predictions about emotional aging. We then review recent evidence on age-related differences in the processing and remembering of emotional stimuli and in emotional reactivity and regulation. We next focus on the cognitive requirements and costs of emotional regulation. Finally, we delineate fruitful new directions in research on emotional aging. Specifically, we propose more systematic efforts to link levels of emotional functioning with long-term outcomes, consideration of emotional goals, combining behavioral with neuroscience studies, and interventions to counteract the costs of an emotion–regulatory focus and improve emotional aging outcomes for those not showing positive affect trajectories.