An ERP investigation of attentional deployment and cognitive reappraisal: Which emotion regulation strategies can younger and older adults successfully employ to modulate brain responses to emotional images

The ways individuals attend to and interpret emotional experiences have immediate and lasting consequences for both their intrapersonal experiences and interpersonal interactions. Understanding how younger and older adults differentially regulate their emotions is important because the resulting outcome may influence their future cognitions, behaviors, and/or emotional experiences. Behavioral, electrophysiological, and neurological measures suggest mixed findings as to which emotion regulation strategies younger and older adults have the ability to use and which strategies they are using independently. Through the use of two event-related potential (ERP) emotion regulation paradigms, the purpose of the current studies was to further understand if older adults could modulate their late positive potential (LPP) responding with attentional deployment (Study 1) and/or cognitive reappraisal (Study 2) and if their responding differed from younger adults. Results revealed that younger and older adults were effective at modulating their neural responding to an attentional deployment paradigm (Study 1). Younger and older adults showed minimal modulation of LPP responding to gradations of negative images with cognitive reappraisal instructions (Study 2). Implications of these findings are discussed along with future directions and limitations.