Psychology

Speaker: Dr. Derek M. Isaacowitz

Location: McKnight Brain Institute, DeWeese Auditorium LG-101A.

The talk will also be accessible via Zoom at this link: https://ufl.zoom.us/j/96369711495

Bio: Derek M. Isaacowitz is currently Professor of Psychology and Director of the Lifespan Emotional Development Lab at Northeastern University; in mid 2024 he will become Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Washington University in St Louis. He was an undergraduate student at Stanford University and received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. His research on emotion regulation and social perception in the context of adult development and aging has been funded by the National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Mental Health, and Velux Stiftung. This research has appeared in journals such as Psychological Science, Social and Psychological and Personality Science, Emotion, and Affective Science. He was editor-in-chief of the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences until the end of 2023 and in 2024 became a senior editor at Psychological Science. He previously served as chair of the Social Psychology, Personality and Interpersonal Processes study section at NIH. He has been the recipient of the Springer Early Career Achievement Award from Division 20 (Adult Development and Aging) of the American Psychological Association, the Margret M. and Paul B. Baltes Foundation Award in Behavioral and Social Gerontology, for Outstanding Early Career Contributions, from the Gerontological Society of America, as well as teaching and mentoring awards.

Talk Title: Emotion Regulation in Aging: What I Used to Think, What I Think Now, and Where I Think We Should Go Next

Talk Abstract: In this talk, I will present the arc of my current thinking about age similarities and differences in emotion regulation. Until recently, I argued that there might be substantial similarity among adult age groups in emotion regulation. But, we recently have conducted several studies that have added some nuance to my thinking. First, we have worked to distinguish emotion regulation strategies from tactics. There seem to be slight, but consistent age differences not in emotion regulation strategies but in tactics – how a strategy is implemented in a particular situation. Certain tactics are common across strategies; for example, some tactics involve upregulating positive aspects of situations, such as focusing on positive aspects of the environment or positive reappraisal, whereas others, such as distraction and detached reappraisal involve downregulating negativity. Second, we have considered concrete aspects of emotional contexts in more detail, such as how tactics vary as a function of objective and subjective situational characteristics and how their use changed during COVID-19. We also have tested specific effects of context on age-related positivity effects in attention by comparing eye tracking in the home to the lab: divergent patterns of age differences in the home as compared to the lab suggest the importance of context in this behavior as well. Together, recent findings have changed my thinking, so that I now believe there are small age differences in emotion regulation but perhaps larger effects of context; future work will continue to investigate specific dimensions of context that may be most important, as well as how to leverage these age and context effects to understand and perhaps intervene on emotion regulation difficulties in cognitively-impaired older adults.