When daily emotions spill into life satisfaction: Age differences in emotion globalizing.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(7), Nov 2023, 644-655; doi:10.1037/pag0000771Although the objective conditions of people’s lives are fairly stable from day to day, daily life can feel like an emotional rollercoaster. For some people, life satisfaction hitches a ride on the emotional rollercoaster (i.e., momentary emotions spill over into broader evaluations of life). The extent to which positive and negative emotions spill over into life satisfaction is referred to as positive and negative emotion globalizing. Initial evidence suggests that emotion globalizing varies between individuals and is linked to a maladaptive psycho...
Source: Psychology and Aging - August 24, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Cognitive aging and experience of playing a musical instrument.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(7), Nov 2023, 696-711; doi:10.1037/pag0000768Musical instrument training has been found to be associated with higher cognitive performance in older age. However, it is not clear whether this association reflects a reduced rate of cognitive decline in older age (differential preservation), and/or the persistence of cognitive advantages associated with childhood musical training (preserved differentiation). It is also unclear whether this association is consistent across different cognitive domains. Our sample included 420 participants from the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936. Between ages 70 and 82, p...
Source: Psychology and Aging - August 21, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Between-person and within-person associations among sensory functioning and attitude toward own aging in old age: Evidence for mutual relations.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(8), Dec 2023, 808-823; doi:10.1037/pag0000772Late-life hearing loss and vision loss might prompt more negative attitudes toward one’s own aging because older adults may interpret impaired sensory functioning as a sign of aging. At the same time, more positive attitudes toward own aging might, via various mechanisms, be associated with better sensory functioning. We investigated how objective hearing and vision are associated with attitude toward own aging (ATOA) over time. Our sample comprised 497 participants from the Berlin Aging Study (mean baseline age: 85.15 years, SD = 8.58 years) who p...
Source: Psychology and Aging - August 17, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Effects of age on face perception: Reduced eye region discrimination ability but intact holistic processing.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(6), Sep 2023, 548-561; doi:10.1037/pag0000759While age-related decline in face recognition memory is well-established, the degree of decline in face perceptual abilities across the lifespan and the underlying mechanisms are incompletely characterized. In the present study, we used the part-whole task to examine lifespan changes in holistic and featural processing. After studying an intact face, participants are tested for memory of a face part (eyes, nose, mouth) with the target and foil part presented either in isolation or in the context of the whole face. To the extent that parts are encoded...
Source: Psychology and Aging - August 17, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Switching it up: Activity diversity and cognitive functioning in later life.
This study further clarifies the unique relationship of activity diversity, beyond physical movement, with cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Psychology and Aging)
Source: Psychology and Aging - August 3, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Differences in the content and coherence of autobiographical memories between younger and older adults: Insights from text analysis.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 39(1), Feb 2024, 59-71; doi:10.1037/pag0000769Several studies have shown that older adults generate autobiographical memories with fewer specific details than younger adults, a pattern typically attributed to age-relate declines in episodic memory. A relatively unexplored question is how aging affects the content used to represent and recall these memories. We recently proposed that older adults may predominately represent and recall autobiographical memories at the gist level. Emerging from this proposal is the hypothesis that older adults represent memories with a wider array of content topics a...
Source: Psychology and Aging - July 20, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Falling hard, but recovering resoundingly: Age differences in stressor reactivity and recovery.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(6), Sep 2023, 573-585; doi:10.1037/pag0000761Strength and vulnerability integration (SAVI) theory (Charles, 2010) posits that age differences in emotional experiences vary based on the distance from an emotionally eliciting event. Before and after a stressor, SAVI predicts that older age is related to motivational strivings that often result in higher levels of well-being. However, during stressor exposure, age differences are predicted to be attenuated or disappear completely. The present study examined how younger (n = 85; Mage = 22.56 years) and older (n = 85; Mage = 71.05 years) adults reac...
Source: Psychology and Aging - July 13, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
The role of caregiving in cognitive function and change: The REGARDS study.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(7), Nov 2023, 712-724; doi:10.1037/pag0000766Chronic stress is associated with negative health outcomes, including poorer cognition. Some studies found stress from caregiving associated with worse cognitive functioning; however, findings are mixed. The present study examined the relationship between caregiving, caregiving strain, and cognitive functioning. We identified participants in the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study who were family caregivers at baseline assessment and used propensity matching on 14 sociodemographic and health variables to identify m...
Source: Psychology and Aging - July 10, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Enhancing ecological validity of gaze-cueing stimuli is associated with increased gaze following for older but not younger adults.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(6), Sep 2023, 562-572; doi:10.1037/pag0000764Gaze following is a core social-cognitive capacity. Previous work has shown that older adults have reduced gaze following relative to younger adults. However, all previous studies have exclusively used stimuli with low ecological validity, leaving room for alternative explanations for the observed age effects. Motivational models suggest that, relative to younger adults, older adults expend cognitive resources more selectively, such that they are less motivated to engage in tasks that are not meaningful or personally relevant. This may explain why th...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 29, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Adult age differences in event memory updating: The roles of prior-event retrieval and prediction.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(6), Sep 2023, 519-533; doi:10.1037/pag0000767Remembering past events can lead to predictions of what is to come and to experiencing prediction errors when things change. Previous research has shown enhanced memory updating for ongoing events that are inconsistent with predictions based on past experiences. According to the Event Memory Retrieval and Comparison (EMRC) Theory, such memory updating depends on the encoding of configural representations that bind retrieved features of the previous event, changed features, and the relationship between the two. We investigated potential age-related di...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 29, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Reward motivation more consistently modulates memory for younger compared to older adults in a directed forgetting task.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(5), Aug 2023, 468-482; doi:10.1037/pag0000762Remembering and forgetting are both important processes of a healthy memory system, but both processes can show age-related decline. Reward anticipation is effective at improving remembering in both younger and older adults, but little is known about the effects of incentives on forgetting. In four online experiments, we examined whether reward motivation modulates intentional remembering and forgetting in younger and older adults, and systematically varied the presentation of reward cues during encoding to test whether the temporal dynamics of rewar...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 29, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Manipulating prescriptive views of active aging and altruistic disengagement.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(8), Dec 2023, 854-881; doi:10.1037/pag0000763Older adults are faced with prescriptions to remain fit and socially engaged (active aging) or limit consumption of social resources (altruistic disengagement), and violations of these may result in backlash and marginalization. Despite such negative consequences that prescriptive views of aging (PVoA) may have for older adults, whether PVoA endorsement is modifiable is still to be examined. Thus, in our study, we investigated the malleability of PVoA endorsement. Further, we explored whether malleability of PVoA endorsement generalizes across specif...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 22, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Middle-aged and older adults’ psychosocial functioning trajectories before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence for multidirectional trends.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(7), Nov 2023, 627-643; doi:10.1037/pag0000760So far little is known with regard to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on changes in psychosocial functioning of middle-aged and older adults across multiple indicators, interindividual differences in these changes, as well as the extent to which pandemic-related changes are temporary or not. We investigate different domains of psychosocial functioning (views on aging: attitude toward own aging [ATOA] and subjective age; subjective well-being: life satisfaction and depressive symptoms; health: self-rated health) across up to 7 years (prepandemic m...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 22, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Reduced distinctiveness of event boundaries in older adults with poor memory performance.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(5), Aug 2023, 401-414; doi:10.1037/pag0000765We experience the world as a continuous flow of information but segment it into discrete events in long-term memory. As a result, younger adults are more likely to recall details of an event when cued with information from the same event (within-event cues) than from the prior event (between-event cues), suggesting that stronger associations are formed within events than across event boundaries. The present study aimed to investigate the effects of age and working memory updating on this within> between cued-recall effect and the consequences for sub...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 22, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Are trajectories of personality and socioeconomic factors prospectively associated with midlife cognitive function? Findings from a 12-year longitudinal study of Mexican-origin adults.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(8), Dec 2023, 749-762; doi:10.1037/pag0000755Problems with memory, executive function, and language are a significant public health concern, especially when they begin during midlife. However, there is relatively little work on risk and protective factors for cognitive function in middle adulthood. Using data from 883 Mexican-origin adults assessed up to 6 times across 12 years (Mage at Time 1 = 38.2 years; range = 27–63 years), the present study examined whether developmental trajectories (levels and slopes) of Big Five personality domains and socioeconomic factors (per capita income, econom...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 15, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
