We have Susanne Scheibe, University of Groningen, visiting this week and giving a talk in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology colloquium (title and abstract follow).

Getting better with age? An emotion perspective on the aging worker

Decades of research on emotional aging have demonstrated that older adults enjoy relatively high well-being and experience advantages in several emotional competencies (such as emotion understanding and regulation) compared to young adults.  Yet, despite the fact that working-age adults spend much of their time working and that pressures rise to work longer, little is known about the implications of age-related differences in emotional functioning for work outcomes. I will summarize theory and findings on emotional development across adulthood which show that, in contrast to typical decline seen in cognitive and physical domains of functioning, age-related changes in the emotional domain are mostly positive. Building on this work, I will present a series of studies with workers in the service and healthcare sectors, including studies using the experience-sampling methodology, that seek to understand the ramifications of emotional development for an aging workforce. These studies suggest that emotional changes with age can confer benefits for occupational health and well-being of older workers, especially in contexts that are emotionally charged.