Role of Anger and Strategies of Regulating Emotions in Satisfactionwith Life in Old Aged Persons

Abstract

The study was conducted to examine the contribution of anger and various cognitive strategies of regulating emotions in satisfaction with life in old age. Previous studies have demonstrated that the health, quality of life and subsequent satisfaction are negatively influenced by the experience of anger, aggressive or hostile behavior. The present research is concerned with the various cognitive strategies to deal with negative emotion, specifically anger, which were hypothesized to predict life-satisfaction of old-age people. For this purpose, a sample of 126 participants, who were 60 plus in age, was taken with purposive sampling method. Data, collected through administering ‘Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire’, ‘Negative Emotion Scale’ and ‘Satisfaction with Life Scale’, was analyzed with the help of ‘Pearson Product-moment Correlation’ and ‘Multiple Regression Analysis’. The results showed that ‘positive reappraisal’, ‘putting into perspective’ and ‘refocus on planning’ were positively, whereas ‘self-blame’, ‘rumination’, and ‘anger’ were found to be negatively associated with life-satisfaction. These strategies of regulating emotional experience and expression and anger, predict 37 percent of the variance in the scores on satisfaction with life.Positive Reappraisal was found to be the most significant predictor.