In the typical loaded verbal working memory (WM) span task (e.g., Daneman & Carpenter, 1980), participants judge the veridicality of a series of sentences while simultaneously storing the sentence final word for later recall. Performance declines as the number of sentences is increased; aging exacerbates this decline. The present study examined…

Although daily social exchanges are important for well-being, it is unclear how different types of exchanges affect daily well-being, as well as which factors influence the way in which individuals react to their daily social encounters. The present study included a sample of 705 adults aged 31 to 91, and using Multilevel Modeling analyses…

Analyses examine change in the age people "feel" ("felt age") and "would like to be" ("ideal age") (relative to current age) in middle and later life. Data are from 1,815 respondents in two waves (1995-96, 2004-06) of the Midlife in the United States Survey (MIDUS) who were age 40+ at Wave 1. In aggregate, people feel about the same amount younger…

This study examined the effects of aging and education on participants' false memory for words that were not presented. Three age groups of participants with either a high or low education level were asked to study lists of semantically related words. Both age and education were found to affect veridical and false memory, as indicated in the…

Two prominent theories of lifespan development, socioemotional selectivity theory and selection, optimization, and compensation theory, make similar predictions for differences in the goal representations of younger and older adults. Our purpose was to test whether the goals of younger and older adults differed in ways predicted by these two…

A person-environment approach was used to explore the relationship between community involvement and attitudes toward aging among middle-age and older lesbians and gay men. Specifically, this study investigated the relationships between participation in gay community activities, perceived control, and aging-related concerns among two…

An online survey (N = 256) compared social networking site (SNS) use among younger (millennial: 18-29) and older (baby-boomer: 41-64) subscribers focusing on the influence of collective self-esteem and group identity on motives for SNS use. Younger participants reported higher positive collective self-esteem, social networking site use for peer…

This study examined the mediating and moderating role of social resources on the association between age and change in functional health for three age groups of older adults. Data were provided by those in their 60s, 80s, and 100s who participated in the first two phases of the Georgia Centenarian study. Analyses confirmed the study's hypothesis…

Theory of mind (ToM) refers to humans' ability to recognize the existence of mental states, such as beliefs, emotions, and desires. The literature on ToM in aging and on the relationship between ToM and other cognitive functions, like executive functions, is not homogenous. The aim of the present study was to explore the course of ToM and to…

The present study examines the leisure style and leisure satisfaction of a sample of older people at baseline and after a period of 5 years. Three groups were identified by factorial and cluster analyses and labelled under the headings of: Organised Style, Surrounding Style and Indoor Style. Each group represented a different typology of leisure,…

One of the social identities held by people is defined by whether or not they smoke cigarettes. Although this identity can and does change for many people over the course of their lives, most research has not examined the effects of transitioning from a smoker to a non-smoker. Using a life span perspective, our analyses contrasted the extent to…

Previous studies suggested that older adults are more likely to engage in heuristic decision-making than young adults. This study used eye tracking technique to examine young adults' and highly educated older adults' attention toward two types of decision-relevant information: heuristic cue vs. factual cues. Surprisingly, highly educated older…

This study focused on the identification of conceptually meaningful groups of individuals based on their joint self-concept differentiation (SCD) and self-concept clarity (SCC) scores. Notably, we examined whether membership in different SCD-SCC groups differed by age and also was associated with differences in psychological well-being (PWB).…

Because of the dearth of available partners, older women looking to date may have to relax their dating standards to find a dating partner, perhaps accepting a life situation that is not what they had hoped for. However older women may be reluctant to sacrifice an often recently-gained lifestyle free of caregiving obligations. Older men, on the…

Using 394 pairs of employees and their immediate supervisors working in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector in three northern European countries, this study examined the effect of workplace moderators on the link between relational demography and supervisor ratings of performance. Directional age differences between superior…