them by their external environment (Labouvie-Vief, 1999; Schaie, 1998). Fur-
ther, older individuals appear to maximize positive affect by simplifying and
optimizing their social networks (Carstensen, 1993; Carstensen, Gross, &
Fung, 1998). More generally, as Baltes and Baltes (1990) suggested, aging in-
dividuals can adjust to increasing resource restrictions by restricting their
goals and activities or becoming more and more selective; at the same time,
they can compensate for some losses by adopting simplifying strategies.
Thus, researchers emphasizing the affect complexity–differentiation criterion
suggest that after a rise in affect complexity from young to middle adulthood,
older individuals’ general cognitive restrictions can lead to a degradation and
simplification of cognitive-affective structures as suggested by Blanchard-
Fields (1999), Hess (1994, 1999), and Labouvie-Vief (2003; Labouvie-Vief &
Medler, 2002).
Taken conjointly, the combined pattern of increases in affect optimization
and decreases in affect differentiation suggests that later life involves a com-
pensatory relationship between the arousal regulating function of optimiza-
tion and the cognitive resources that can be brought to bear on regulation.
Overall, such compensation allows individuals to maintain positive affect, yet
with reduced flexibility—in other words, by degrading their representations
of reality.
What evidence suggests that possible deficits of regulation may play a role
in older individuals? In a recent study, we (Wurm, Labouvie-Vief, Rebucal, &
Koch, 2003) examined the hypothesis inherent in the dynamic integration
principle that in less familiar situations older individuals’ lowered complexity
may make it more difficult to process highly arousing–activating informa-
tion. To test this hypothesis we (Wurm et al., 2003) used Bradley and Lang’s
(1999) library of emotion words rated for arousal and valence to create an
emotional Stroop task. Specifically, younger and older individuals were pre-
sented with the words printed in different colors and instructed to read the
color of the word. Findings showed an age by arousal interaction. There were
no arousal level differences for the young whose mean was 676 msec/word. In
contrast, the older showed a significant rise of reading times for the high
arousal condition (923 msec for high arousal, 891 for low, 887 for medium).
These results indicate that older individuals may have a problem inhibiting
arousal in novel situations, especially if those involve relatively high levels of
activation. As Eisdorfer (1968) showed, older individuals seem to experience
more disruption from arousal than do younger ones.
It might be objected that our emotional Stroop data reflect the relatively
low structure of the task we used, but difficulty with arousal in the older indi-
vidual can also occur in tasks that involve good structure but using a sample
with more highly arousing stimuli than ones often used in research on emo-
tion and aging. An example is a recent study by Kunzmann (Kunzmann &
Grün, 2003) in which young and old adults watched a brief movie about a
- AFFECT OPTIMIZATION AND DIFFERENTIATION 261