woman confronted with a diagnosis of early signs of Alzheimer’s and the
need to make provisions for her expected decline. This quite dramatic stimu-
lus produced significantly more sadness in the older than the young adults,
suggesting that conclusions about the generalized ability to maintain positive
and ward off negative emotions in later life may not be warranted; rather, af-
fect regulation will depend to a great degree on how emotion is elicited.
If resource restrictions resulting in decreased inhibitory and reflective con-
trol play a role in such regulatory deficits, then degraded cognitive-affective
representations should widely occur in older populations. One consequence
of such simplification is a tendency to become more polarized affectively, ne-
glecting negative information while favoring positive information (Carsten-
sen et al., 1998; Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999). Such positive dis-
tortion was shown in a study by Mather, Shafir, and Johnson (2000), who
found that older people retrospectively distorted memories, recalling options
they had actually chosen over ones they had discarded. Thus the emotion-
regulation function of selectively attending to positive information is traded
off for an increasing distortion of memory. That such an emphasis on affect
optimization contains a compensatory component was also shown in our
own research indicating that over a 6-year span, decreases in affect complex-
ity predicted increases in optimization (Labouvie-Vief et al., 2003; see also
Labouvie-Vief & Medler, 2002).
One specific way in which lowered reflective control is evidenced is in older
individuals’ increased reliance on stereotypes. In a recent study, Mather,
Johnson, and De Leonardis (1999) showed that aging individuals’ poor
source monitoring leads to greater stereotype reliance in the elderly. In a simi-
lar fashion, Von Hippel, Silver, and Lynch (2000) found that elderly individ-
uals relied more heavily on stereotypes even when instructed not to do so.
The Von Hippel et al. (2000) study further showed, as would be expected
from the principle of dynamic integration, that this process is entirely auto-
matic and may occur despite the consciously held values individuals adhere
to. Indeed, many older individuals were bothered by their automatically acti-
vated stereotypes.
Older adults’ tendency to give relatively stereotypic and less-differentiated
snap judgments about others has also been emphasized in Blanchard-Fields’
(1999) research on attributional style across the adult life span. In a series of
studies, Blanchard-Fields and colleagues observed that older adults (and ado-
lescents) made less differentiated or dialectical attributional explanations than
young and middle-aged adults (see also Follett & Hess, 2002). This was espe-
cially true in negative relationship outcomes, where the elderly tended to attrib-
ute the cause of the negative outcome more to internal characteristics of the
primary agent than young adults did (Blanchard-Fields, 1994; Blanchard-
Fields, Baldi, & Stein, 1999; Blanchard-Fields & Norris, 1994). Blanchard-
Fields and Norris (1994) suggested that this finding reflects older individuals’
262 LABOUVIE-VIEF AND GONZÁLEZ