Max Planck Research Group Affect Across the Lifespan
The Max Planck Research Group Affect Across the Lifespan (Head: Michaela Riediger) investigated differences in people’s emotional experience and affective competencies from adolescence to old age.
Many tasks in our lives—from forming and maintaining personal relationships to coping with work-related challenges—require the abilities to experience, express, understand, and control affective states such as anger or joy. But do emotional experiences change in the course of people’s lives? And do people from various age groups differ in their abilities to understand and deal with affective aspects of life? These and similar questions were the focus of the group’s work.
Researchers in the group combined cell phone-based experience-sampling technology, which enabled emotions to be captured at the moment in question, with psychophysiological monitoring and experimental paradigms. It was also taken into account that affective development is influenced by the social context in which it takes place.
Research period: January 2009–December 2014