Sex and age cohort differences in patterns of socioemotional functioning in older adults and their links to physical resilience

Although the aging process brings with it some common challenges to older men and women, there has been little attention to gender differences in patterns of socioemotional functioning or their links to adaptive outcome. In this paper we examine patterns of socioemotional functioning among 687 “younger” (65–73 years) and 426 “older” (74–86 years) men and women, describe sex differences in these patterns, and examine whether the same patterns are linked to physical resilience in the same ways across groups. Cluster analysis was applied to 11 measures of socioemotional functioning with ten qualitatively different patterns emerging. As expected, men and women from our two age groups were not equally distributed across the patterns. As expected, older men more frequently manifested patterns of adaptation characterized by inhibited emotion but, together with younger men, were less likely to be represented in patterns characterized by stress-buffering friend support networks. The patterns also showed predictable links to a measure of physical resiliency, which was predicted by participant sex, and both sex and age interacted with cluster membership in predicting resiliency. Taken together, these data underscore the complexity of adaptation to later life among men and women and highlight the possibility that the existence of particular patterns of later life adaptation may have differing late life consequences for older men and women. Implications for the continued study of sex differences in adaptation to later life and directions for future research are given. Nathan S. Consedine has a faculty appointment in the Psychology Department at Long Island University and is deputy director of the Intercultural Institute on Human Development and Aging. His research training centered on evolutionary functionalism and its applications to personality and goal striving. He has since turned the ideas developed during this time to the lifespan developmental consideration of emotions, emotion regulation, and adaptive outcomes among diverse ethnic groups. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Gerontological Society of America, and the International Society of Research on Emotion. She is also the founding director of the Intercultural Institute on Human Development and Aging. The Institute is devoted to research, training, and consultation on the role of culture in health and human development. Yulia S. Krivoshekova is a research associate and project coordinator at the Intercultural Institute on Human Development and Aging and is currently in her fifth year of clinical training in the Psychology Department at Long Island University (Brooklyn). Her research is focused on the cognitive and health-related consequences of self-disclosure processes, with an emphasis on developmental differences and cultural variation.