Older adults make greater use of word predictability in Chinese reading.
An influential account of normative aging effects on reading holds that older adults make greater use of contextual predictability to facilitate word identification. However, supporting evidence is scarce. Accordingly, we used measures of eye movements to experimentally investigate age differences in word predictability effects in Chinese reading, as this nonalphabetic language has characteristics that may promote such effects. Word-skipping rates were higher and reading times lower for more highly predictable words for both age groups. Effects of word predictability on word skipping did not differ across the 2 adult age g...
Source: Psychology and Aging - August 5, 2019 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Time may heal wounds: Aging and life regrets.
Psychological research on regret has focused mostly on the negative emotions associated with troubling past decisions. Because aging is associated with a preference for positive information in attention and memory, investigation into positive emotions elicited by regrets may provide insights into adult developmental changes in subjective experience. The present study investigated age differences in regret-related affect in a survey of adults (n = 629) aged 18–92 years. Positive and negative affect emerged as discrete dimensions of regret-related affect with age trajectories that benefit well-being. (PsycINFO Database Rec...
Source: Psychology and Aging - July 22, 2019 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Facets of accommodative coping in adulthood.
This study showed no age differences but significant correlations between the ACCO-5 dimensions and indicators of positive adaptation. Study 4 (N = 240) investigated the correlations between goal-specific ACCO-5, subjective goal control, and age. In summary, the present paper provides evidence that the components of ACCO-5 do measure similar, but not identical facets of a complex construct in developmental regulation. Differentiating between these facets contributes to a better understanding of the structure and function of accommodative processes in adulthood. We emphasize that the differentiated assessment of these facet...
Source: Psychology and Aging - July 22, 2019 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Older workers’ plans for activities in retirement: The role of opportunities, spousal support, and time perception.
Retirement is a major life-course transition for which some people plan more than others. Given that planning positively affects retirement adjustment, it is important to investigate the heterogeneity in retirement planning and its antecedents. While financial preparation has been thoroughly investigated, little is known about the activities older workers plan to do in retirement. We hypothesize that older workers’ plans for retirement activities can be categorized into 3 domains: bridge employment, self-developmental leisure, and social leisure. Moreover, we expect these plans to be affected by workers’ opportunities ...
Source: Psychology and Aging - July 15, 2019 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Do judgments of learning modify older adults’ actual learning?
Judgments of learning (JOLs) can improve younger adults’ associative learning of related information. One theoretical explanation for this finding is that JOLs strengthen the relationship between the cue and target words of a related word pair. This cue-strengthening hypothesis is particularly relevant for older adults because learning interventions that enhance associations between items typically benefit their learning. Thus, we investigated the degree to which JOLs have a direct influence on older adults’ learning. To do so, older and younger adults studied a list of related word pairs (Experiments 1 and 2) or weakl...
Source: Psychology and Aging - July 1, 2019 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Still more to learn about late-life cognitive development: How personality and health predict 20-year cognitive trajectories.
We examined the role of personality and health as time-invariant and time-varying predictors of changes in different cognitive domains based on data from the Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study on Adult Development. Our sample consisted of 500 individuals born between 1930 and 1932 (baseline age: M = 62.87 years, SD = 0.89 years) who were assessed up to 4 times over an interval of up to 20 years. Cognitive abilities were measured by multiple well-established tests representing crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence, and information processing speed. Because of poor psychometric properties of openness in our sample,...
Source: Psychology and Aging - July 1, 2019 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
The influence of tears on older and younger adults’ perceptions of sadness.
This study reports three experiments that test whether the presence of tears differentially affects older and younger adults’ perceptions of sadness. Experiment 1 was a laboratory-based experiment and also assessed facial mimicry responses using electromyography (EMG). Experiments 2 and 3 were conducted online. Across all three experiments, participants rated faces as showing greater sadness when tears were present compared to absent, and most critically, participant age did not moderate this effect—young and older adults responded equivalently to the presence of tears. Another finding to emerge across all experiments ...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 20, 2019 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Age-related differences in referential production: A multiple-measures study.
Contemporary research on aging has provided mixed evidence for whether older adults are less effective than younger adults at designing and delivering spoken utterances. However, most of these studies have focused on only specific aspects of this process. In addition, they tend to vary significantly in terms of the degree of complexity in their chosen stimuli or task. The present study compares younger and older adults’ performance using a referential production paradigm involving simple everyday objects. We varied referential context such that a target object was either unique in its category (e.g., one shirt), or was a...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 17, 2019 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Is age more than a number? The role of openness and (non)essentialist beliefs about aging for how young or old people feel.
We examined whether the variability in an individual’s subjective age can be explained by (a) openness to experience and (b) (non)essentialist beliefs about aging. Specifically, we predicted that individuals who have high (vs. low) levels in openness and those who believe that aging is a flexible (vs. fixed) process have a younger rather than an older subjective age. Evidence from one cross-sectional (N = 228) and one longitudinal study (N = 3848) confirmed our hypotheses that a more malleable view of aging mediates the effect of openness to experience on subjective age bias. We discuss these findings in the light of soc...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 17, 2019 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Control diversity: How across-domain control beliefs are associated with daily negative affect and differ with age.
Domain-specific control beliefs typically buffer the influence stressors have on people’s negative affect (affective stressor reactivity). However, little is known about the extent to which individuals’ control beliefs vary across stressor types and whether such stressor-related control diversity is adaptive for affective well-being. We thus introduce a control diversity construct (a person-level summary of across-domain control beliefs) and examine how control diversity differs with age and relates to negative affect and affective stressor reactivity. We apply a multilevel model to daily diary data from the National S...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 13, 2019 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Social relations and age-related change in memory.
Previous research suggests that social relations are associated with age-related memory change. However, social relations are complex and multidimensional, and it is not yet clear which aspects (structure, quality) may be beneficial over time. Further, the strength and direction of associations may differ depending on relationship type (partner, children, other family, friends). Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study (n = 10,390; Mage = 69, SD = 9.53 at baseline), latent growth curve models tested which aspects of social relations predicted 6-year episodic memory trajectories. Both structure and quali...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 10, 2019 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Age differences in the relationship between cortisol and emotional memory.
Research has shown that remembering emotional information can occur at the expense of surrounding neutral background information; this emotional memory trade-off occurs similarly in both younger and older adults. We investigated how levels of cortisol, a hormone that acts on the central nervous system, impact emotional memory with age. Younger and older adult participants incidentally encoded emotional (positive, negative, or neutral) items placed on neutral backgrounds and later completed recognition tests for both the items and the backgrounds. Cortisol was measured at multiple time points to assess basal cortisol. Resul...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 10, 2019 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
A systematic review and meta-analysis of age-related differences in trust.
This systematic review and meta-analysis quantifies the magnitude and breadth of age-related differences in trust. Thirty-eight independent data sets met criteria for inclusion. Overall, there was a moderate effect of age group on trust (g = 0.22), whereby older adults were more trusting than young adults. Three additional meta-analyses assessed age-related differences in trust in response to varying degrees of trustworthiness. This revealed that older adults were more trusting than young adults in response to neutral (g = 0.31) and negative (g = 0.33), but not positive (g = 0.15), indicators of trustworthiness. The effect...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 6, 2019 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Age-related differences in evaluation of social attributes from computer-generated faces of varying intensity.
In everyday life throughout the life span, people frequently evaluate faces to obtain information crucial for social interactions. We investigated age-related differences in judgments of a wide range of social attributes based on facial appearance. Seventy-one younger and 60 older participants rated 196 computer-generated faces that systematically varied in facial features such as shape and reflectance to convey different intensity levels of seven social attributes (i.e., attractiveness, competence, dominance, extraversion, likeability, threat, and trustworthiness). Older compared to younger participants consistently gave ...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 3, 2019 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
A systematic review of the relationship between perceived life script event age and valence across the life span.
Drawing on life script theory, we examined the relationship between the perceived age and valence of life script events across the life span. A review of the life script literature was conducted based on 14 studies, comprising 28 samples from 12 countries, and encompassing 4,012 participants. A total of 135 life script events between birth and death were identified—roughly four times the number of such events reported in any single sample. As predicted, the relationship between mean perceived life script age and valence for positive life script events during the bump period (i.e., between the ages of 10 and 30 years) was...
Source: Psychology and Aging - May 30, 2019 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
