A comparative investigation of emotion regulation patterns in different decades of age

Emotional regulation is a process of an individual recognizing what emotions they are under the effect of, and how they can experience and manage them.

The present study aims to compare the emotional regulation patterns of individuals in various decades of their lives aged 20-70 in Tehran.

The research has a causal-comparative design and the statistical population comprises of all individuals aged 20-70 in 2019 in Tehran, among which 230 people were selected through convenience and answered the questionnaires of difficulties in emotion regulation, emotion regulation, and  emotion regulation of others and self. SPSS v.2 software was used to perform data analysis through multivariate variance analysis.

Results indicated only the factor of using emotional regulation strategies was significantly different across age decades (P-value=0.002). Pairwise comparison indicated that 20-30 decade was significantly different from 51-60 and 61-70 decades with respective P-values of 0.02 and 0.03; while the 31-40 decade was significantly different from 51-60 and 61-70 decades with respective P-values of 0.03 and 0.01 at the significance level of less than 0.05. The difference was such that the highest emotional regulation was associated with the 61-70 decade with a value of 4.57 and the lowest rate was associated with 19-30 and 31-40 decades with the value of 3.96.

The difference between the use of emotional regulation in various ages and the use of compatible emotional regulation strategies in higher age decades could contribute to our understanding of the role of age difference in individuals’ emotional experiences.