Studying the various facets of emotional aging

To study emotional aging is to study a very multi-faceted concept. In particular, the study of emotion and aging covers a wide range of topics. Taking a closer look, domains of functioning can be differentiated such as pertaining to the experiential nature of emotion or its regulation, as well as social-cognitive processes associated with the perception of emotion in others or emotion-related attention and memory retrieval. Importantly, evidence over the last two decades suggests that not all of these functional domains are negatively affected by the aging process. Rather late-life development in emotion-related functional domains is characterized by multi-directionality, in that aging seems to be associated with deterioration in abilities related to emotion perception and increased difficulty remembering (particularly negative compared to positive) emotional information, while emotional experience and emotion-regulatory capacities appear to remain relatively preserved or even improve with age. Also, the study of emotion and aging covers a wide range of theoretical orientations, paradigms, and methods to adequately capture the complexity of the phenomenon. In particular, emotional aging researchers use self-report, experience sampling, cognitive-behavioral observation, eye tracking, electroand psychophysiological as well as different functional brain imaging techniques among their assessment tools to ensure recording from the multiple channels emotions can be expressed in, and to shed light on the phenomenon of interest from different angles. In the current Frontiers research topic Emotion and Aging: Evidence from Brain and Behavior, 13 groups of researchers contributed with their expertise, and the included papers reflect the theoretical, methodological, and statistical diversity of this research field. In the following, we briefly introduce each paper contribution. For a more thorough discussion of the articles’ theoretical innovation, methodological approach, and scientific advancement contextualized in the broader literature on emotional aging as well as for a constructive reflection about topics untouched in this research topic and future directions the field could take, see Ebner and Fischer (2014) in this Frontiers research topic.