Do older adults construct more emotionally gratifying social environments than younger adults? Evidence from a social network decision task

Abstract

Do older adults construct more emotionally gratifying social environments than younger adults? According to socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), older adults actively construct their social environments to satisfy emotional goals, drawing closer to gratifying close others and pruning less rewarding persons. Yet, there is a scarcity of direct evidence showing that older adults indeed construct more gratifying social environments by pruning negative persons and by drawing closer to positive persons. We employed a novel social network decision task to study age-related differences in the emotional composition of social environments that people construct and associations with emotional experience. In three studies, participants spanning the adult age range constructed hypothetical social environments, choosing among players according to their performance on word search puzzles and valenced feedback provided by the players about the participants’ own performance. Positive valence players always provided positive feedback, whereas negative valence players always provided negative feedback. Our findings partially support SST but draw a theoretically important distinction between pruning existing social environments and constructing new social environments. When pruning an existing social environment, older adults maintained more positive as well as more negative valence players. Conversely, when required to include players to construct their social environment, older adults produced more positive social environments by excluding negative valence players. The social environment participants constructed was associated with their emotional experience, but our findings suggest that emotion drives gratifying social choices rather than vice versa. Implications for lifespan theory of motivation are discussed.