Motivation for social contact across the life span: a theory of socioemotional selectivity.

作者：Laura L. Carstensen · 发表于：PubMed · 年份：1992 · 被引用次数：635 · 研究领域：Aging and Gerontology Research

Older people engage in social interaction less frequently than their younger counterparts. As I mentioned at the start, the change has been interpreted in largely negative terms. Yet when asked about their social relationships, older people describe them as satisfying, supportive, and fulfilling. Marriages are less negative and more positive. Close relationships with siblings are renewed, and relationships with children are better than ever before. Even though older people interact with others less frequently than younger people do, old age is not a time of misery, rigidity, or melancholy. Rather than present a paradox, I argue here that decreasing rates of contact reflect a reorganization of the goal hierarchies that underlie motivation for social contact and lead to greater selectivity in social partners. This reorganization does not occur haphazardly. Self-definition, information seeking, and emotion regulation are ranked differently depending not only on past experiences, but on place in the life cycle and concomitant expectations about the future. I contend that the emphasis on emotion in old age results from a recognition of the finality of life. In most people's lives this does not appear suddenly in old age but occurs gradually across adulthood. At times, however, life events conspire to bring about endings more quickly. Whether as benign as a geographical relocation or as sinister as a fatal disease, endings heighten the salience of surrounding emotions. When each in...