Abstract
Maintaining emotional well-being in late life is crucial for achieving successful and healthy aging. While previous research from Western cultures has documented that emotional well-being improves as individuals get older, previous research provided mixed evidence on the effects of age on well-being in Eastern Asian cultures. However, previous studies in East Asia do not always take into account the effects of cognitive control—an ability which has been considered as a key to enable older adults to regulate their emotions. In the current study, we tested whether cognitive control abilities interact with age in determining individuals’ well-being in 59 Japanese females (age range: 26–79; Mage = 64.95). Participants’ mental health and mental fatigue were tracked for 5 years together with their cognitive control abilities. We found that as individuals became older, they showed improved mental health and decreased mental fatigue. In addition, we found a quadratic effect of age on mental fatigue, which was further qualified by baseline cognitive control abilities. Specifically, in those who had a lower level of cognitive control abilities, mental fatigue declined until the mid-60s, at which point it started increasing (a U-shape effect). In contrast, in those who had a higher level of cognitive control ability, mental fatigue showed a steady decrease with age even after their mid-60s. These results suggest that whether advancing age is associated with positive vs. negative changes in well-being depends on cognitive control abilities, and that preserved cognitive control is a key to maintain well-being in late life.
Highlights
Aging is typically associated with a range of negative experiences, such as declines in physical functioning and a loss of close friends
We focused on Stroop and Digit Backward performance as a measure of individuals’ cognitive control ability at Wave 1 and created a composite score based on performance in these two tasks; A similar measure was computed in previous studies as well (Davis et al, 2010)
We compared the variables reported in this article at Wave 1 between participants who participated all of the assessments and those who did not, but did not observe any significant difference between the groups; subjective well-being inventory (SUBI) Mental Health, t(24) = 2.06, p = 0.785, d = 0.08, SUBI Mental Fatigue t(18) = 2.10, p = 0.123, d = 0.54, and the cognitive control index, t(23) = 2.07, p = 0.373, d = 0.28
Summary
Aging is typically associated with a range of negative experiences, such as declines in physical functioning and a loss of close friends. When older adults are invited to lab experiments, they are more likely to pay attention to and remember positive information than negative information (Mather and Knight, 2005; Knight et al, 2007; Sakaki et al, 2013; Reed et al, 2014). This age-by-valence interaction has been called the positivity effect. Older adults are more likely to prioritize emotion regulation goals and invest more effort in what is most important for their emotional well-being than do younger adults This motivational shift is considered to result in preferential processing of positive stimuli as well as better emotional experiences in old age
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