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Emotion–Cognition Relations in Aging

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Integrating Emotions and Cognition Throughout the Lifespan

Abstract

This chapter surveyed emotional and cognitive development after mature adulthood and during the process of aging. It begins with presenting views of the nature of aging and noting that the process of aging has undergone considerable change over the course of historical time, with a considerable prolongation of the life span. As aging proceeds, it shows that with increasing age, the cognitive system becomes more vulnerable, and acquisition of new knowledge more difficult. In contrast, knowledge already learned and well automated remains intact until late in life.

On the emotional side, aging is often accompanied by richness of emotional knowledge and skills, as long as tasks are not too taxing in terms of the demands they place on cognitive activities, and especially executive functioning. These demands tend to rise situations that are novel rather than well mastered, thereby placing more demands on resources. In addition to task novelty, the degree to which an emotional task is highly arousing becomes a factor that particularly affects aging individuals particularly negatively, a phenomenon which implies that, in contrast to early life stages, the thresholds for tension become restricted in later life. However, in the absence of high demands on novelty or tension tolerance, aging individuals even can continue to further develop the complexity of knowledge systems, as documented, for example, in research on remembering and interpreting text, where many older individuals give non-literal answers display rich understanding of inner psychological dynamics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Original German Title: “Die Zukunft des Alterns.”

  2. 2.

    Declarative knowledge generally refers to well-learned knowledge, such as vocabulary and general knowledge.

  3. 3.

    The cerebellum is widely associated with the coordination of movements.

  4. 4.

    Individuals are presented the words of colors (e.g., “green,”) but in colors that do not correspond with the semantic meaning of words presented. Because semantic meaning is strongly crystallized in the elderly, it is expected to interfere with the task requirement—i.e., to just label the color of the word.

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  1. University of Geneva, Geneva, Geneve, Switzerland

    Gisela Labouvie-Vief

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Labouvie-Vief, G. (2015). Emotion–Cognition Relations in Aging. In: Integrating Emotions and Cognition Throughout the Lifespan. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09822-7_7

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