Differential impacts of healthy cognitive aging on directed and random exploration.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 39(1), Feb 2024, 88-101; doi:10.1037/pag0000791Deciding whether to explore unknown opportunities or exploit well-known options is a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives. Extensive work in college students suggests that young people make explore–exploit decisions using a mixture of information seeking and random behavioral variability. Whether, and to what extent, older adults use the same strategies is unknown. To address this question, 51 older adults (ages 65–74) and 32 younger adults (ages 18–25) completed the Horizon Task, a gambling task that quantifies information seeking and behavior...
Source: Psychology and Aging - February 15, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Stability and change of optimism and pessimism in late midlife and old age across three independent studies.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 39(1), Feb 2024, 14-30; doi:10.1037/pag0000789Research across a number of different areas in psychology has long shown that optimism and pessimism are predictive of a number of important future life outcomes. Despite a vast literature on the correlates and consequences, we know very little about how optimism and pessimism change across adulthood and old age and the sociodemographic factors that are associated with individual differences in such trajectories. In the present study, we conducted (parallel) analyses of standard items from the Life Orientation Test (Scheier & Carver, 1985) in three com...
Source: Psychology and Aging - February 15, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Adult age-related differences in susceptibility to social conformity pressures in self-control over daily desires.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 39(1), Feb 2024, 102-112; doi:10.1037/pag0000790Developmental literature suggests that susceptibility to social conformity pressure peaks in adolescence and disappears with maturity into early adulthood. Predictions about these behaviors are less clear for middle-aged and older adults. On the one hand, while age-related increases in prioritization of socioemotional goals might predict greater susceptibility to social conformity pressures, aging is also associated with enhanced emotion regulation that could support resistance to conformity pressures. In this exploratory research study, we used mobi...
Source: Psychology and Aging - December 7, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Public events knowledge in an age-heterogeneous sample: Reminiscence bump or bummer?
We examined associations between PEK and relevant variables such as crystallized intelligence (Gc), news consumption, and openness to experience with structural equation models. Strong associations between PEK and Gc were established, whereas the associations of PEK with news consumption and openness were mainly driven by their link to declarative knowledge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Psychology and Aging)
Source: Psychology and Aging - November 2, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Differences in self-perceptions of aging across the adult lifespan: The sample case of awareness of age-related gains and losses.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(8), Dec 2023, 824-836; doi:10.1037/pag0000783Rooted in the premises of lifespan developmental theory, the concept of awareness of age-related change (AARC) posits that growing older comes with both experiences of gains and losses across different behavioral domains. However, little is known about how age-related change is perceived across the entire adult lifespan, provided that respective measures can be validly compared. Further, few studies have adopted an approach that examines gains and losses simultaneously to study a potential shift in the ratio of perceived age-related gains and losses ...
Source: Psychology and Aging - November 2, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Levels of awareness of age-related gains and losses throughout adulthood and their developmental correlates.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(8), Dec 2023, 837-853; doi:10.1037/pag0000784Views of aging predict key developmental outcomes. Less is known, however, about the consequences of constellations of domain-specific perceived gains and losses across the full adult lifespan. First, we explored levels of awareness of age-related gains (AARC-gains) and losses (AARC-losses) in five behavioral domains across adulthood. Second, we identified the number and types of profiles of AARC-gains and AARC-losses in young adulthood, midlife, young–old age, and old–old age. Third, we investigated whether the identified profiles differed in th...
Source: Psychology and Aging - October 30, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Age differences in the experience of everyday happiness: The role of thinking about the future.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 39(1), Feb 2024, 1-13; doi:10.1037/pag0000782Happiness can be experienced differently in young as compared to older adulthood, possibly due to shifts in temporal focus and differences in preferences for high- versus low-arousal affective states. The current project aimed to replicate initial evidence on age-related differences in the experience of happiness by investigating the positive affective correlates of everyday happiness; we further explored the role of thinking about the future in moderating such associations. We used daily life assessments from 257 participants (Mage = 48.3, SDage = 24.6...
Source: Psychology and Aging - October 26, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Profiles of activity engagement and depression trajectories as COVID-19 restrictions were relaxed.
This study aimed to (a) identify activity engagement profiles among middle-aged and older adults, (b) understand factors associated with profile memberships, and (c) compare depression trajectories across profiles as COVID-19 restrictions eased over 16 months in Singapore. This longitudinal study involved 6,568 middle-aged and older adults. Latent growth analysis was first conducted to obtain estimates of depression trajectories for each individual. Latent profile analysis was then conducted to identify different activity profiles. Finally, profile characteristics and depression trajectories across these different profiles...
Source: Psychology and Aging - October 23, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Loneliness and cognitive function in older adults: Longitudinal analysis in 15 countries.
This study aims to evaluate the directionality of the association between loneliness and cognitive performance in older adults, accounting for confounding factors. Data were from 55,662 adults aged ≥ 50 years who participated in Waves 5–8 of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Loneliness was assessed with the Three-Item Loneliness Scale (TILS) and with a one-item direct question. Cognitive performance was assessed with four measures: verbal fluency, numeracy, immediate recall, and delayed recall. Age, sex, geographical area, educational attainment, partnership status, depressive symptoms, and...
Source: Psychology and Aging - October 19, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Longitudinal associations of volunteering, grandparenting, and family care with processing speed: A gender perspective on prosocial activity and cognitive aging in the second half of life.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(8), Dec 2023, 790-807; doi:10.1037/pag0000780An active lifestyle has been associated with better cognitive performance in many studies. However, most studies have focused on leisure activities or paid work, with less consideration of the kind of prosocial activities, many people engage in, including volunteering, grandparenting, and family care. In the present study, based on four waves of the German Ageing Survey (N = 6,915, aged 40–85 at baseline), we used parallel growth curves to investigate the longitudinal association of level and change in volunteering, grandparenting, and family care ...
Source: Psychology and Aging - October 16, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Limited time horizons lead to the positivity effect in attention, but not to more positive emotions: An investigation of the socioemotional selectivity theory.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 39(1), Feb 2024, 46-58; doi:10.1037/pag0000781A positivity effect in attention (i.e., an attentional bias in favor of positive over negative stimuli) has been frequently reported in older adults. Based on the postulates of socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), the present study tested whether this positivity effect: (a) depends on the subjective perception of a limited future time perspective (FTP) independently of chronological age, (b) involves controlled processes, and (c) contributes to optimizing positive emotions. Thirty-one older adults (aged 75–93) and 92 younger adults (aged 18–23)...
Source: Psychology and Aging - October 12, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Long-term aging trajectories of the accumulation of disease burden as predictors of daily affect dynamics and stressor reactivity.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(8), Dec 2023, 763-777; doi:10.1037/pag0000779Multiple-timescale studies provide new opportunities to examine how developmental processes that evolve at different cadences are intertwined. Developmental theories of emotion regulation suggest that the long-term, slowly evolving age-related accumulation of disease burden should shape short-term, faster evolving (daily) affective experiences. To empirically examine this proposition, we combined data from 123 old adults (65–69 years, 47% women) and 32 very old adults (85–88 years, 59% women) who provided 20 + year within-person longitudinal data...
Source: Psychology and Aging - October 12, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Cohort differences in trajectories of life satisfaction among Japanese older adults.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(7), Nov 2023, 601-614; doi:10.1037/pag0000778Individual development and aging are shaped by historical changes in sociocultural contexts. Studies indicate that later-born cohorts experience improvements in well-being in the young–old. However, whether this historical trend holds in the old–old remains unknown. Using longitudinal data of Japanese older adults, we examined birth cohort differences in trajectories of well-being as measured by life satisfaction. Data were derived from a nationally representative study conducted from 1987 to 2012. We compared earlier- and later-born cohorts over...
Source: Psychology and Aging - September 21, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Testing can enhance episodic memory updating in younger and older adults.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(7), Nov 2023, 656-669; doi:10.1037/pag0000776Older adults sometimes show impaired memory for recent episodes, especially those that are similar but not identical to existing memories. Two experiments examined if interpolated testing between episodes improves recent memories for older and younger adults (N = 60 per group and experiment). Participants studied two lists of cue–response word pairs. Some pairs included the same cue in both lists with changed responses. Between lists, List 1 pairs were tested (Experiments 1 and 2), tested with corrective feedback (Experiment 1 only), or restudied (...
Source: Psychology and Aging - September 4, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Experiencing daily negative aging stereotypes and real-life cognitive functioning in older adults: A diary study.
This study provides new insights for studies on aging stereotypes threat and offers theoretical guidance for future interventions for cognitive health in older adults and, in turn, contributes to promoting healthy aging in older adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Psychology and Aging)
Source: Psychology and Aging - August 31, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
