Psychology and Aging

The present study examined age differences in word-frequency effects in Korean visual word recognition through a large-scale, web-based lexical-decision task. Four hundred ninety-seven adult Korean speakers in their 20s through 60s participated in the task, in which they decided the lexicality of 120 Korean words varying in frequency and 120 nonwords. Overall, both lexical-decision accuracy and response times increased with age, and more frequent words were recognized more rapidly than less frequent words. We also found significant effects of participants' reading skill as well as age of acquisition of words...

Developmental 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 mobile experience sampling surveys to naturalistically track how 157 healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 80 practice self-control over spontaneous desires in daily life...

Emotional empathy is a congruent emotional response stemming from another's emotional state and has mixed evidence for its association with age. We sought to synthesize existing data to investigate cross-sectional changes in emotional empathy across adulthood using random-effects meta-analyses. Embase, APA PsycInfo, Medline, and Scopus databases were systematically searched until October 2022. Thirty-three studies assessed age categorically by comparing older ( M = 68.42, SD = 4.95) with younger ( M = 27.55, SD = 6...

The reminiscence bump describes an increased recollection of autobiographic experiences made in adolescence and early adulthood. It is unclear if this phenomenon can also be found in declarative knowledge of past public events. To answer this question, we assessed public events knowledge (PEK) about the past 6 decades with a 120-item knowledge test across six domains in a sample of 1,012 Germans that were sampled uniformly across the ages of 30-80 years. General and domain-specific PEK scores were analyzed as a function of age-at-event...

Rooted 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 from adolescence to advanced old age...

Views 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 their associations with developmental correlates...

Happiness 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 ( M age = 48...

Given elevated depression rates since the onset of the pandemic and potential downstream implications, this research examined the association between activity engagement and depression among middle-aged and older adults postlockdown. 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...

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...

An 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 with level and change in processing speed...

Multiple-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 on physician-rated morbidity and subsequently also completed repeated daily-life assessments of stress and affect six times a day over 7 consecutive days as they were going about their daily-life routines...

A 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) were recruited...

Individual 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 10 years in two age groups: the young-old ( n = 1,195 per cohort; age 63-74; years of birth: 1913-1924 and 1925-1936) and the old-old ( n = 436 per cohort; age 75-86; years of birth: 1901-1912 and 1913-1924)...

Older 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 (Experiment 2 only)...

Older adults may be confronted with a variety of negative aging stereotypes (e.g., "forgetful," "physically frail," and "lonely") almost every day. While experimental studies have demonstrated the impact of negative aging stereotypes on older adults' cognitive performance, the relationship between multiple negative aging stereotype experiences and cognitive functioning in older people's daily lives is largely unknown. Using a 1-week daily diary study approach, the present studies examined the association between experiencing daily negative aging stereotypes and real-life cognitive functioning and the mediating role of daily negative affect...

This study aimed to investigate how age affects the ability to comprehend sentence meaning, specifically how individuals resolve pronouns to their corresponding nouns. The study included 34 young participants (20-29 years old) and 34 older participants (60-81 years old). The participants were presented with sentences containing two characters and a third-person singular pronoun. Stereotypical genders associated with character names were manipulated such that the pronoun had either one, two, or no possible antecedents, rendering the pronoun referentially unambiguous, ambiguous, or mismatched, respectively...

People spontaneously segment continuous ongoing actions into sequences of events. Prior research found that gaze similarity and pupil dilation increase at event boundaries and that older adults segment more idiosyncratically than do young adults. We used eye tracking to explore age-related differences in gaze similarity (i.e., the extent to which individuals look at the same places at the same time as others) and pupil dilation at event boundaries. Older and young adults watched naturalistic videos of actors performing everyday activities while we tracked their eye movements...

Although 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 psychological profile...

Musical 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...

Late-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...