OCT 6

10: OCT 6

Emotional regulation as a compensating strength of aging. Give basic argument for connecting emo reg to wisdom.

"Carstensen and her colleagues have proposed that successful emotional regulation is tightly connected to a persons sense of time—usually, but not always, time as it is reflected by one's age and stage of life. "According to our theory, this isn't a quality of aging per se, but of time horizons," she explained. "When your time perspective shortens, as it does when you come closer to the ends of things, you tend to focus on emotionally meaningful goals. " 63

SST: socioemotional selectivity theory (Cartensen's) “In shortening time span of later life, people focus on emotionally meaningful experience.

Emotional Resilience: Job's emotional resilience. Is it patience or resilience? What is the diff? Note, Job does not suppress negative emotion, but bounces back to an equilibrium. “Surely, vexation kills the fool.” (Today’s heuristic!)

problem in history of philosophy -- downplaying of emotion. But then Hume, and James' "What is an Emotion?"

Gross: "reappraisal" and "reflection" as techniques of emotional regulation. vs. “rumination” 66. Very important! Note mechanism suggested for each. (Note connection to therapeutic writing. Possible topic for short research.) Notice this way of thinking suggests that emotional regulation is trainable. (Note Tim Wilson’s research in Redirect.)

Cartensens' research in assisted living homes. “Have you seen what’s out there?…I don’t have time to talk to those people.” counterintuitive answers. (67) "time horizon" theory. Implications.

Carstensen on the paradigmatic tasks of the young: "knowledge trajectory" (70); "collectors" 71, in older age, a shift from knowledge related goals to emotion-related goals.

71: neuroscience on learning from loss; affect forecasting (accuracy in predicting how we will feel. Could dampen negative emotion, right? Examples?) young as steep "discounters"; greater appetite for risk, less for ambiguity. (Probably don’t want to change that, but it describes a problem also.)

73: emotional resilience in Davidson's longitudinal neuroscience research: correlation of emotional regulation and brain pattern. (Brains that regulate emotion look diff in real time.) Gabrielli studies on young amygdalas. Gross on male/female emotional processing.

positive illusion (optimism bias) - note that negative visualization might facilitate it, as in the Irvine point about the two fathers.

Concluding Group Discussion: Is emotional regulation something that a young person could use to mimic the emotional regulative experience of older people? Is such a goal possible, desirable?

Abstract: “The subjective sense of future time plays an essential role in human motivation. Gradually, time left becomes a better predictor than chronological age for a range of cognitive, emotional,and motivational variables. Socioemotional selectivity theory maintains that constraints on time horizons shift motivational priorities in such a way that the regulation of emotional states becomes more important than other types of goals. This motivational shift occurs with age but also appears in other contexts (for example, geographical relocations, illnesses, and war) that limit subjective future time.”

The mechanism here 1913, col. 3: shortening time horizons affect goal selection, preferences, attention and memory.

Comparisons of younger people with short time horizons (due to untreatable illness, for example) show parallel to older people. Likewise 1914, col 1, study showing manipulation of goal selection in older people who are told that they are going to live a lot longer.

SST: two categories shift: motivation for knowledge acquisition and regulation of emotion. Shift from horizon expanding goals (like job training) to emotionally meaningful goals.