ABSTRACT
The recent news from the field of socioemotional aging is positive, maybe even surprisingly so. As more and more evidence has emerged pointing to impressive affective resilience as people age, the search has begun for the psychological mechanisms underlying this resilience, particularly given the well-documented negative effects of aging on many aspects of health and cognitive functioning. In search of the psychological processes underlying the ability of most older individuals to successfully regulate their emotions and to maintain high levels of well-being even as cognition and physical health may become more problematic, it seems clear that this affective success is no accident. Eye tracking is an exciting methodology for studying attention, but when differences between young and older adults are found in attentional patterns using eye tracking, an obvious concern is being able to demonstrate that the observed differences are actually about attention to emotion and not merely an artifact of age changes in vision or more general cognitive functioning.
