Gisela Labouvie-Vief

University of Geneva

The Dynamics of Cognitive-Emotional Integration: Complexity and Hedonics in Emotional Development

Much recent research on emotional development has extended accounts of emotional development in children into the domain of adulthood and aging. Against the hoped-for finding of continuation of increases in emotion regulation into late life, results suggested a much less positive a picture, and even declines, in older individuals. Such declines are often interpreted as implying that regulation processes in later life are compromised as a result of declines in executive processes in later life.

Findings show, however, that not just late middle adulthood, but even late life can be characterized by flexible emotion regulation, as evidenced by ease and effectiveness of emotion regulation of many older individuals. Such findings are in contrast to the tendency of much on the literature on the aging of emotions to underscore massive declines in executive functions and fluid intelligence as a source of declines in emotion regulation. Rather they suggest that cognitive losses do not automatically translate into losses in emotion regulation.  Indeed, a problem of the emotion regulation literature, particularly of that of later life, has been a polarization between emotions as automatic processes and their control or regulation as effortful ones. Instead, even relatively complex emotion regulation can be accomplished through the means of regulation processes that have come to be automated into high-level cognitive-emotional structures whose efficiency does not necessarily rely on high effort and difficulty.

In this keynote address, I propose that, nevertheless, development and aging bring strengths and limits in such efficiency. To discuss these strengths and limits, I outline a theory initially stimulated by Piaget’s (1981) writings on the parallel relationships between progressions in cognitive development and those in the domain of emotion: emotions as dynamics and cognition as structure. Since that theory was closely tied to equilibrium models, it also implies increases in complexity of representations that, in turn, bring changes in the conditions under which equilibrium is maintained. I propose that these conditions have direct consequences for the hedonics of emotion—that is, feelings of efficacy, comfort, and emotional well-being as opposed to comfortable to distress and even panic. In this way, equilibrium processes are directly tied to developing representations.

I generalize the resulting equilibrium model to the total of the life span, from womb to tomb. Beginning with a discussion of the concept of equilibrium from a primarily physiological-biological perspective, I generalize it to Piaget-type stages as moments of equilibrium or assimilation in a succession of changes. I generalize this simple model of equilibrium to one that involves expansion and transformation through momentary disequilibrium, culminating in an eventual widening its range and level of functioning at biological and psychological levels. Finally, I show how this model can be applied to the development of emotion regulation processes across the life span, highlighting different stages of life and detailing core differences between processes of development and aging.