strong reliance on salient sociocultural schemas, leading them to focus more on
violations of the social rules (dispositional judgments). This finding is consis-
tent with a recent study by Rahhal, May, and Hasher (2002) indicating that
older individuals selectively attend to information that highlights moral values
such as truth and character. Such reliance on standards, norms, and rules may
reflect the fact that dispositional attributions require less effort and consume
less cognitive resources than more complex dialectical ones that integrate more
contextual and causal information (Gilbert, Palham, & Krull, 1988).
The hypothesis that an age-related reduction in processing efficiency un-
derlies a host of affective processing data is congruent, then, with much avail-
able research. Even so, according to Hess (2001), it may not be the age-
related reduction in processing efficiency per se that is explaining some of
these data, but rather the motivational shift this reduction brings with it: a
heightened motivation for preserving available resources and engaging in ac-
tivities and tasks that minimize effort. Hess (2001) proposed the construct
personal need for structure (PNS) to account for this dispositional preference
or “desire for simplicity in both cognitive activities and structures” (p. 482).
The PNS has been found to be related to less complex ways of organizing in-
formation (Neuberg & Newsom, 1993) and spend less time processing
schema-inconsistent information (Hess, Follett, & McGee, 1998), among
other findings. The documented age-related increment in the selectivity of
cognitive activities (Baltes, 1997), situations (Gross et al., 1997), or relation-
ships and social partners (Carstensen, 1991) may also be consequences of
such an age-related motivational shift that may be only partially accounted
for by cognitive resource declines (see Hess, Rosenberg, & Waters, 2001).
CONCLUSIONS
In the present chapter, we have suggested that well-being and positive self-
regulation require the coordination of two strategies of regulation. One, af-
fect optimization, is aimed at dampening negative while maximizing positive
affect. The second, cognitive-affective differentiation, has as its primary aim
the formation of objective representations of reality. We proposed that the
ability to coordinate these two strategies yields integration. The capacity for
integration is fostered at low to intermediate levels of emotional activation
but impeded at extreme levels of activation, when integration yields to sys-
tematic forms of degradation, involving distortions of intersubjectivity such
as ingroup–outgroup and stereotype formation. This dynamic mechanism of
compensation can be altered by the availability of cognitive resources, such
as age-related shifts in processing capacity or habitual mechanisms of less-
than-optimal regulation.
The principle of dynamic integration is, as its core, a normal principle of
affect regulation and equilibrium maintenance by which organisms can re-
- AFFECT OPTIMIZATION AND DIFFERENTIATION 263