Socioemotional aging: Expecting differences, finding similarity

Derek M. Isaacowitz

（Northeastern University）

报告人简介：

Derek M. Isaacowitz，Northeastern University（西北大学）教授，为老年心理学和情绪心理学方面的顶级专家。目前担任顶级期刊 Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Science 的主编，曾担任 Emotion 和 Psychology and Aging 的副主编，Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 的编委会成员，Cognition and Emotion 的客座主编。并且 Isaacowitz 教授担任多个一流期刊的审稿人。Isaacowitz 教授是美国人格与社会心理学会会士 (fellow)、美国老年学会会会士、美国心理学会和美国实验社会心理学会会士。Isaacowitz教授主持多项NIH课题，及其他研究课题。在包括 American Psychologist，Personality and Social Psychology Review 等SSCI发表学术论文一百余篇。

Abstract:

Research in my lab focuses on the effects of human aging on 2 socioemotional processes: emotion regulation, and social perception. In both domains, there have been strong reasons to expect age differences. On the emotion regulation side, conceptual models have hypothesized that older adults may more successfully utilize emotion regulation strategies to optimize their positive affect. On the social perception side, a large number of previous studies point to age-related declines in accuracy. Previous studies have generally been designed to maximize the chances of observing age-related improvements in emotion regulation and agerelated declines in social perception. I will present several recent studies that have attempted to use comprehensive methods to describe the behavior of younger, middle-aged and older adults in a range of emotion regulation and social perception tasks. We then used Bayesian approaches to determine whether evidence favored the alternate hypothesis of age differences or the null hypothesis of no age differences. While evidence supported age differences on some tasks, for many others the evidence supported no age differences. These findings are considered from the perspective of how researchers can construct conceptual models of socioemotional aging that take seriously the possibility that some (or many) of the relevant processes do not vary substantially by age.