The Relationship Between The Regulation Of Sadness And Autonomic Nervous Response In The Elderly

The overall emotional well-being of the old people maintain at a high level,and the negative emotional experience is relatively reduced,but there may be different development trends in specific emotions.Some studies believe that the sad emotion of the old people will increase,with the increase of age,physical diseases and negative life events caused by sad emotions will have a negative impact on the quality of life of the old people.Effective regulation of negative emotions is very important for the social adaptation.Different regulatory strategies have different regulatory effects on subjective emotional experience,behavioral response and physiological arousal.The Polyvagal Theory and the Model of Neurovisceral Integration all believe that that vagus plays an important role in emotional response and regulation.vagus nervous system can actively inhibit the effects of sympathetic nervous system(SNS)on cardiac activity and put it in a state of calm necessary to participate in social behavior.The paper consists of two studies.The effect of baseline vagus nerve control on the intensity of emotional response to sadness in the elderly were investigated in experiment one.Experiment two used two strategies of distraction and inhibition to down-regulate the sadness mood of the elderly and investigate the difference of the effect of the two strategies.(1)Older people with low baseline vagal control had more heart rate declines when watching sad movies;(2)Distraction strategies are more conducive to down-regulation than inhibition strategies;(3)Suppressive strategies require more mental effort than distraction strategies.