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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
The Long Reach Of Nurturing Family Environments: Links With Midlife Emotion- Regulatory Styles And Late-Life Security In Intimate Relationships, Waldinger J. Robert, Schulz S. Marc
The Long Reach Of Nurturing Family Environments: Links With Midlife Emotion- Regulatory Styles And Late-Life Security In Intimate Relationships, Waldinger J. Robert, Schulz S. Marc
Psychology Faculty Research and Scholarship
Does the warmth of children’s family environments predict the quality of their intimate relationships at the other end of the life span? Using data collected prospectively on 81 men from adolescence through the eighth and ninth decades of life, this study tested the hypotheses that warmer relationships with parents in childhood predict greater security of attachment to intimate partners in late life, and that this link is mediated in part by the degree to which individuals in midlife rely on emotion-regulatory styles that facilitate or inhibit close relationship connections. Findings supported this mediational model, showing a positive link between more …
Facing The Music Or Burying Our Heads In The Sand?: Adaptive Emotion Regulation In Mid- And Late-Life, Robert J. Waldinger, Marc S. Schulz
Facing The Music Or Burying Our Heads In The Sand?: Adaptive Emotion Regulation In Mid- And Late-Life, Robert J. Waldinger, Marc S. Schulz
Psychology Faculty Research and Scholarship
Psychological defense theories postulate that keeping threatening information out of awareness brings short-term reduction of anxiety at the cost of longer-term dysfunction. By contrast, Socioemotional Selectivity Theory suggests that preference for positively-valenced information is a manifestation of adaptive emotion regulation in later life. Using six decades of longitudinal data on 61 men, we examined links between emotion regulation indices informed by these distinct conceptualizations: defense patterns in earlier adulthood and selective memory for positively-valenced images in late life. Men who used more avoidant defenses in midlife recognized fewer emotionally-valenced and neutral images in a memory test 35-40 years later. Late-life …