Cross-sectional Studies on the Development of Emotion Regulation Across Adulthood: The Revised Emotion Regulation Scale

Abstract

Prior studies hypothesize that older people are motivated to regulate their emotions, which, consequently, improves their emotional well-being. The present study aims to examine age differences in emotion regulation among adults by using the revised emotion regulation scale. Studies 1 (N = 153) and 2 (N = 518) examined adolescence and early to late adulthood and confirmed one factor structure of the revised scale for the total sample and for each age group except for adolescence. The model fit and internal consistency were lower in adolescence. Although the revised scale was positively associated with optimism, extraversion, adaptive coping, positive affect, and cognitive appraisal, it was not related to neuroticism, maladaptive coping, negative affect, and expressive suppression, which proved construct validity. As predicted, older participants exhibited better emotion regulation than younger participants. Longitudinal evidence needs to be obtained to investigate whether the development of emotion regulation could improve people's emotional well-being.