Bind Senior Couples by Sharing a Bind

You’ll be confronting a married elderly adult with bad news which will require a difficult decision. You’d like to persuade the elderly adult to decide in a way which you are confident will be most beneficial to them. Because you don’t know either the husband or wife well, you realize the persuasion task requires finesse. Before conducting the meeting, you plan out what you’ll be saying and how you expect the conversation to go.
     Researchers at University of Leipzig advise you to expect a quite different conversational flow depending on whether you meet with one member of the pair alone or the couple together. If you’re meeting with just the husband or wife, expect the positivity bias to kick in. As people reach advanced age, they pay more attention to the upsides and to put a happy edge on situations. This change helps the elderly deal with inevitable discomforts and disappointments and to make best use of their limited lifespan. But if delivering news to the couple together, expect a greater expression of emotions like anger, fear, and sadness.
     The researchers say this is because sharing deeply felt emotions, whether negative or positive, strengthens emotional closeness and mutual trust for elderly adults. When with a trusted friend or family member, they let down their hair—well, whatever hair they have. A history of emotional closeness and mutual trust enables them to do this, but it is the desire to build further closeness and trust which motivates them to do this. The benevolent cycle is especially strong when there’s a romantic relationship and a history of confronting difficulties together, as would be likely with an elderly married couple.
     When you are that influence agent who doesn’t know the influence target well, meet with the couple together to deliver the bad news. Compared to meeting with just the husband or wife, you’ll hear more of the range of emotions each member of the pair is feeling and you’ll bolster the togetherness which will help each member of the pair handle the difficulty.
     This research also gives one possible solution to a positivity bias mystery: Why do Chinese elderly adults not show it as strongly as American elderly adults? It might be because China is a collectivist society. Trust for decisions in difficult situations is broadly extended. Unlike in America, negative emotions show whether meeting with a family member or a stranger.

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