Personal and collective mental time travel across the adult lifespan during COVID-19.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(5), Aug 2023, 374-388; doi:10.1037/pag0000758Older adults exhibit an age-related positivity effect, with more positivity for memories than young adults. Theoretical explanations attribute this phenomenon to greater emphasis on emotion regulation and well-being due to shortened time horizons. Adults, across the lifespan, also exhibit a collective negativity bias (more negativity about their country than their personal past and future) and a future-oriented positivity bias (more positivity for future projections than for memories). Threats to global health (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic) may shorte...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 15, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
A longitudinal examination of the role of social identity in supporting health and well-being in retirement.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(7), Nov 2023, 615-626; doi:10.1037/pag0000757Social factors are major determinants of the success of retirement transitions. However, we do not yet fully understand the nature and basis of this impact, particularly as it relates to social group belonging. To address this issue the present article investigated the role that social group memberships play in supporting people’s health and well-being in the early phase of transitioning to retirement. More specifically, we drew on the social identity model of identity change (SIMIC) to examine two pathways in which social group processes are theor...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 12, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Optimal cognitive offloading: Increased reminder usage but reduced proreminder bias in older adults.
We examined younger and older adults’ (N = 88) performance on a memory task where they chose between remembering delayed intentions with internal memory (earning maximum reward per item) or external reminders (earning a reduced reward). This allowed us to distinguish (a) the absolute number of reminders used versus (b) the proreminder or antireminder bias, compared with each individual’s optimal strategy. Older adults used more reminders overall, as might be expected, because they also had poorer memory performance. However, when compared against the optimal strategy weighing the costs versus benefits of reminders, it ...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 8, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Age differences in emotional experiences associated with helping and learning at work.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(5), Aug 2023, 389-400; doi:10.1037/pag0000756Drawing on socioemotional selectivity theory and goal theories of emotion, this study examined age differences in helping and learning activities at work and the emotional correlates of such activities. We hypothesized that older workers help colleagues more than younger workers and derive greater emotional benefits from helping; and that younger workers learn more often at work and derive greater emotional benefits from learning. Frequency of employees’ (N = 365; age 18–78 years) helping, learning, and emotional experience were monitored for 5 d...
Source: Psychology and Aging - June 8, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Sow in tears and reap in joy: Eye tracking reveals age-related differences in the cognitive cost of spoken context processing.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(6), Sep 2023, 534-547; doi:10.1037/pag0000753Older adults have been found to use context to facilitate word recognition at least as efficiently as young adults. This may pose a conundrum, as context use is based on cognitive resources that are considered to decrease with aging. The goal of this study was to shed light on this question by testing age-related differences in context use and the cognitive demands associated with it. The eye movements of 30 young (21–27 years old) and 30 older adults (61–79 years old) were examined as they listened to spoken instructions to touch an image on a m...
Source: Psychology and Aging - May 25, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Interactions across the ages: How concerns about warmth and competence impact age-based stereotype threat in the workplace.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(7), Nov 2023, 740-747; doi:10.1037/pag0000754Although the disengagement consequences of age-based stereotype threat in the workplace are well-documented, it is less clear what causes employees to experience age-based stereotype threat. Based on socioemotional selectivity theory, the present study examines whether and why daily cross-age interactions in the workplace lead to stereotype threat. Using a diary study design over 2 weeks, 192 employees (86 employees aged 30 and younger; 106 employees aged 50 and older), completed 3570 reports on daily interactions with coworkers. Results showed that ...
Source: Psychology and Aging - May 22, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Semantic item-level metrics relate to future memory decline beyond existing cognitive tests in older adults without dementia.
In conclusion, item-level data hold a wealth of information with potential to reveal subtle semantic memory impairment, which tracks with episodic memory impairment, among older adults without dementia beyond existing neuropsychological measures. Implementation of psycholinguistic metrics may point to cognitive tools that have better prognostic value or are more sensitive to cognitive change in the context of clinical trials or observational studies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Psychology and Aging)
Source: Psychology and Aging - May 18, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Initial status and change in cognitive function mediate the association between academic education and physical activity in adults over 50 years of age.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(6), Sep 2023, 494-507; doi:10.1037/pag0000749Higher levels of academic education are associated with higher levels of physical activity throughout the lifespan. However, the mechanisms underlying this association are unclear. Cognitive functioning is a potential mediator of this association because higher levels of education are associated with better cognitive function, which is related to greater engagement in physical activity. Here, we used large-scale longitudinal data from 105,939 adults 50 years of age or older (55% women) from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe to in...
Source: Psychology and Aging - May 11, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
The respective contribution of cognitive control and working memory to semantic and subjective organization in aging.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(5), Aug 2023, 455-467; doi:10.1037/pag0000752Organizing information is beneficial to episodic memory performance. Among several possible organizational strategies, two consist of organizing the information in semantic clusters (semantic organization) or self-organizing the information based on new associations that do not exist in semantic memory (subjective organization). Here, we investigated in a single study how these two organizational behaviors were underlined by different controlled processes and whether these relations were subjected to age-related differences. We tested 123 younger adu...
Source: Psychology and Aging - May 11, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Age-related differences in memory when offloading important information.
We presented younger adults (n = 99; age range: 18–31) and older adults (n = 93; age range: 60–96) with items to remember for a later test and allowed them to offload a subset of the presented items. In Experiment 1, the to-be-remembered information was lists of associated words paired with point values counting toward participants’ scores if recalled. In Experiment 2, the to-be-remembered information was lists of items along a theme, such as packing for vacation, which differed in subjective value. Results revealed that when words were paired with objective point values, younger adults were more selective in their o...
Source: Psychology and Aging - May 11, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
The effects of different navigational aids on wayfinding and spatial memory for older adults.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(7), Nov 2023, 670-683; doi:10.1037/pag0000732Navigation aids can help people conduct daily wayfinding activities. However, because of cognitive limitations that can emerge with age, it is not clear how different navigation aids impact wayfinding behaviors and spatial memory in older adults. In Experiment 1, 66 older adults and 65 younger adults participated. They were asked to make turn decisions when the navigation aid was a map, a map plus self-updating (Global Positioning System [GPS]), or a text. After the wayfinding task, they completed two spatial memory tasks recalling scenes and drawing...
Source: Psychology and Aging - April 27, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Dissociating proactive and reactive control in older adults.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(4), Jun 2023, 323-332; doi:10.1037/pag0000748The Dual Mechanisms of Control framework predicts that age-related declines should be most prominent for tasks that require proactive control, while tasks requiring reactive control should show minimal age differences in performance. However, results from traditional paradigms are inconclusive as to whether these two processes are independent, making it difficult to understand how these processes change with age. The present study manipulated the proportion congruency in a list-wide (Experiments 1 and 2) or item-specific (Experiment 1) fashion to ind...
Source: Psychology and Aging - April 27, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Detrimental effects of effortful physical exertion on a working memory dual-task in older adults.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(4), Jun 2023, 291-304; doi:10.1037/pag0000746Action and cognition often interact in everyday life and are both sensitive to the effects of aging. The present study tested the effects of a simple physical action, effortful handgrip exertion, on working memory (WM) and inhibitory control in younger and older adults. Using a novel dual-task paradigm, participants engaged in a WM task with 0 or 5-distractors under concurrent physical exertion (5% vs. 30% individual maximum voluntary contraction). Effortful physical exertion, although failing to effect WM accuracy in the distractor absent condition ...
Source: Psychology and Aging - April 27, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Increased cognitive effort costs in healthy aging and preclinical Alzheimer’s disease.
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(5), Aug 2023, 428-442; doi:10.1037/pag0000742Life-long engagement in cognitively demanding activities may mitigate against declines in cognitive ability observed in healthy or pathological aging. However, the “mental costs” associated with completing cognitive tasks also increase with age and may be partly attributed to increases in preclinical levels of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology, specifically amyloid. We test whether cognitive effort costs increase in a domain-general manner among older adults, and further, whether such age-related increases in cognitive effort costs are associa...
Source: Psychology and Aging - April 17, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
Life course engagement in enriching activities: When and how does it matter for cognitive aging?
Psychology and Aging, Vol 38(4), Jun 2023, 263-276; doi:10.1037/pag0000744Growing evidence suggests that participation in enriching activities (physical, social, and mental) across the life course is beneficial for cognitive functioning in older age. However, few studies have examined the effects of enrichment across the entire life course within the same participants. Using 2,931 participants in the Health and Retirement Study, we linked self-report data from later life and retrospective self-report data from early life and midlife to cognitive performance after Age 65. We categorized participants as having either high (t...
Source: Psychology and Aging - April 17, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research
