Over the past decade or so, developments in language comprehension research in the domain of cognitive aging have converged on support for resilience in older adults with regard to situation model updating when reading texts. Several studies have shown that even though age-related declines in language comprehension appear at the level of the…

While personality is relatively stable over time, it is also subject to change across the entire lifespan. On a macro-analytical level, empirical research has identified patterns of normative and differential development that are affected by biological and environmental factors, specific life events, and social role investments. On a…

The Convoy Model suggests that at different stages of the lifespan the makeup of the social support network varies in step with developmental and contextual needs. Cultural norms may shape the makeup of social convoys as well as denote socio-demographic differences in social support. This study examines the social convoys of adults in Mexico.…

Many interventions are characterized by repeated observations on the same individuals (e.g., baseline, mid-intervention, two to three post-intervention observations), which offer the opportunity to consider differences in how individuals vary over time. Effective interventions may not be limited to changing means, but instead may also include…

We address how to conceptualize and measure intentional self-regulation (ISR) among adolescents from four cultures by assessing whether ISR (conceptualized by the SOC model of Selection, Optimization, and Compensation) is represented by three factors (as with adult samples) or as one "adolescence-specific" factor. A total of 4,057 14-…

Social anxiety is a common mental disorder with an average age of onset in early adolescence. Current theories focus largely on risk factors that are present from early in life, but reasons for onset of the disorder as youth move into adolescence are rarely discussed. We recently proposed a model of the onset of certain mental disorders during the…

The present article aims to show how to model longitudinal change in cohort sequential data applying latent true change models using Mplus' multi-group approach. The underlying modeling ideas are described and explained in this article. As an example, change in internalizing problem behaviors between the age of 8 and 13 years is modeled and…

The current study demonstrates the application of an analytic approach for incorporating multiple time trends in order to examine the impact of cohort effects on individual trajectories of eight drugs of abuse. Parallel analysis of two independent, longitudinal studies of high-risk youth that span ages 10 to 40 across 23 birth cohorts between 1968…

Youth in Western countries are exposed to many messages that sexualize women. We selectively review the literature on sexualization with the goal of clarifying and integrating theories, constructs, and models of the pathways and mechanisms via which exposure to such messages may affect youth. In the first section of the article, we define…

Subjective health is known to predict later outcomes, including survival. However, less is known about subjective health changes across adulthood, how personality moderates those changes, and whether such associations differ with age. We applied growth models to 10 waves of data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey…

Past research has documented age differences in the size and composition of social networks that suggest that networks grow smaller with age and include an increasingly greater proportion of well-known social partners. According to socioemotional selectivity theory, such changes in social network composition serve an antecedent emotion regulatory…

Theory suggests that the vision-for-perception and vision-for-action processing streams operate under very different temporal constraints (Glover, 2004; Goodale, Jackobson, & Keillor, 1994; Graham, Bradshaw, & Davis, 1998; Hu, Eagleson, & Goodale, 1999). With the present study, children and young adults were asked to estimate how far a cued target…

This paper is aimed at analyzing verbal and nonverbal strategies in terms of body contact, face-to-face contact, and discourse style during the first three months of life in two cultural communities that have been characterized as embodying different cultural models of parenting: German middle-class, and Nso farmer families. It can be demonstrated…

Social capital has traditionally been defined in terms of the amount of resources that one derives as a result of a diversity of interpersonal relationships. However, the quality of these relationships across development has not been examined as a contributor to social capital and few studies have examined the significance of various age-salient…

Growth mixture modeling (GMM) is a method for identifying multiple unobserved sub-populations, describing longitudinal change within each unobserved sub-population, and examining differences in change among unobserved sub-populations. We provide a practical primer that may be useful for researchers beginning to incorporate GMM analysis into their…