Age differences among older adults in the use of emotion regulation strategies. What happens among over 85s and centenarians?

Emotion regulation is defined as the internal transactional processes through which people consciously or unconsciously modulate one or more components of their emotions by changing their own experience, behavior or expression or by altering the situation that gave rise to the emotion in the first place (Eisenberg, Fabes, Guthrie, & Reiser, 2000; Gross, 1999).

In Psychology, the term is used to refer to the diverse processes that in one way or another modify (attenuate, strengthen or transform) both the external expression and the subjective experience of any positive or negative emotion (Etxebarria, 2002).

Effective emotion regulation has been deemed one of the challenges of human development. In specific terms, given that some intense emotions have the power to disrupt and interfere with multiple psychological processes, the modulation of their experience and expression (through intrapsychic and interpersonal processes) is considered vital for exploratory behavior, cognitive processes and social competence (Fox, 1994).