Older people generally experience more positive and less negative emotions than younger people, a new study has found.
Even during the difficult conditions presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, on average, older people were found to be emotionally better off.
In a two-phase study, the University of Amsterdam researchers collected data in a large-scale survey with 23,350 people during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. People were sampled across 63 different countries, nearly one third of the countries in the world.
Researchers Rui Sun and Disa Sauter asked people to report their recent experiences of ten different positive emotions and ten negative emotions, and found that older people experienced more positive and less negative emotions than younger people.
This result was remarkably consistent across countries, said the researchers.
“Our results show that the advantage that older people have in their emotional experiences exists across cultures, and that it holds across countries that are very different, also in terms of the severity of the pandemic during our data collection,” they said.
In the second study phase, Sun and Sauter directly compared a nationally representative sample of 4,370 people before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study made use of a Dutch longitudinal project in which the same people are tested every year (the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences).
The researchers found that older people experienced more positive and less negative emotions than younger people, but this difference was smaller during the pandemic.
Sun and Sauter link the advantage in emotional experience of older adults to a theory that states that older people are better at avoiding situations that are likely to make them feel bad.
“This is generally an effective strategy for feeling better during non-pandemic conditions, but the pandemic has limited everyone’s options in their actions,” they said.
“This might explain why the advantage for older adults was reduced during the pandemic. Older people had less possibility to opt into situations that they wanted to be in, and to opt out of situations they didn’t want to be in.”
The researchers conclude that, taken together, these results highlight the resilience of older people. Even during the difficult conditions of a pandemic, older people are on average emotionally better off than younger people.
“This points to older adults being able to utilise some strategies and resources that help ameliorate even sustained stress, such as avoiding negative situations,” the authors conclude.
