Everyday Salivary Cortisol in Older Adulthood: Capturing Time-Varying Socio-Emotional Contours in the Wild

Abstract

Older adults often prioritize emotionally meaningful experiences and social interactions in the face of limited future time perspectives. The presented line of work extends findings from controlled laboratory studies by addressing the processes underlying everyday associations between affective experiences, social contexts, and salivary cortisol in old age. Data are based on repeated daily life assessments of everyday affect, social contexts, and cortisol from community-dwelling older individuals and couples. Pooled analyses based on multiple data sets point to significant within-person couplings in everyday affect and salivary cortisol such that in moments when positive affect is decreased and negative affect is increased, cortisol is elevated. Older adults with more relative to fewer health conditions show less pronounced everyday affect-cortisol linkages. Mostly healthy older adults engaging in more relative to less physical activity show less elevated cortisol in moments when negative affect is higher. Analyzing couple data, we further show that spouses’ everyday fluctuations in salivary cortisol significantly co-vary over time (synchrony). Cortisol synchrony is particularly pronounced when partners feel close and understood. We further demonstrate that dyadic synchrony is shaped by the larger socio-political context in which is occurs and that it could have implications for longer term health risks. The presented line of work points to the promise of capturing dynamically changing salivary cortisol as individuals and couples engage in their everyday lives and environments to better understand key social and emotional resources that could be nourished to promote healthy aging.