When daily emotions spill into life satisfaction: Age differences in emotion globalizing.

Abstract

Although the objective conditions of people's lives are fairly stable from day to day, daily life can feel like an emotional rollercoaster. For some people, life satisfaction hitches a ride on the emotional rollercoaster (i.e., momentary emotions spill over into broader evaluations of life). The extent to which positive and negative emotions spill over into life satisfaction is referred to as positive and negative emotion globalizing. Initial evidence suggests that emotion globalizing varies between individuals and is linked to a maladaptive psychological profile. Integrating a lifespan perspective, this is the first study to identify and describe age differences in emotion globalizing using data from two adult community samples (Study 1: N = 133 women, age range = 23-78; Study 2: N = 137, age range = 18-95). Further, we tested key boundary conditions of emotion globalizing by examining two types of emotions (i.e., current or after most stressful event of the day) and two types of satisfaction (i.e., overall life satisfaction [life satisfaction] or current day satisfaction [day satisfaction]). Specifically, we investigated how younger and older adults differed in the associations of current emotions with life satisfaction (i.e., emotion globalizing; Study 1), stressor-related emotions with life satisfaction (i.e., stressor-related emotion globalizing; Study 1), and stressor-related emotions with day satisfaction (Study 2). Results revealed that older (compared to younger) adults exhibited less negative (but not positive) emotion globalizing and stressor-related emotion globalizing. We found no age differences in the association between stressor-related emotions and day satisfaction. These findings extend insights into emotion globalizing and inform theories of emotional aging. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).