Establishing and Maintaining Social Relationships During Significant Life Events: The Role of Age.

Objectives: We investigate how adults of different ages experience changes in their social relationships during significant life events. Based on different goal priorities, younger adults may benefit more from establishing new social contacts during a significant life event, whereas older adults may benefit more from maintaining existing relationships.

Methods: To test these hypotheses, we conducted multilevel modeling with a sample of N = 6,688 participants aged 18-90 years who reported at least 1 significant life event in the past 2 years.

Feeling Younger on Active Summer Days? On the Interplay of Behavioral and Environmental Factors With Day-to-Day Variability in Subjective Age.

Background And Objectives: Subjective age, that is, how old people feel in relation to their chronological age, has mostly been investigated from a macro-longitudinal, lifespan point of view and in relation to major developmental outcomes. Recent evidence also shows considerable intraindividual variations in micro-longitudinal studies as well as relations to everyday psychological correlates such as stress or affect, but findings on the interplay with physical activity or sleep as behavioral factors and environmental factors such as weather conditions are scarce.

Research Design And Methods: We examined data from 80 recently retired individuals aged 59-76 years ( = 67.

Are social interactions perceived as more meaningful in older adulthood?

Social relationships accompany us throughout adulthood and are among the most important sources of meaning in a person's life. However, little is known about age differences in meaningfulness of social interactions across adulthood. According to socioemotional selectivity theory, as people age, they develop relatively stronger preferences for social relationships that are emotionally meaningful.

Assessing psychological variables on mobile devices: an introduction to the experience sampling app .

The use of the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), which involves repeated assessments in people's daily lives, has increased in popularity in psychology and associated disciplines in recent years. A rather challenging aspect of ESM is its technical implementation. In this paper, after briefly introducing the history of ESM and the main reasons for its current popularity, we outline the experience sampling app which is currently being developed at the University of Vienna.

Differences in self-perceptions of aging across the adult lifespan: The sample case of awareness of age-related gains and losses.

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.

Levels of awareness of age-related gains and losses throughout adulthood and their developmental correlates.

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.

Willingness to Live Under Impairment: Factors Associated With Desired Longevity.

Background And Objectives: Longevity is a societal achievement. However, people might not wish to live long lives under all conditions. When deciding about their longevity desires, some individuals may focus on present-oriented, concrete aspects of their lives, like their current state of health, whereas others may weigh up more future-oriented, abstract aspects, such as how important it is to be healthy.

Experiences of solitude in adulthood and old age: The role of autonomy.

Recent evidence suggests that older adults experience momentary states of spending time alone (i.e., solitude) less negatively than younger adults.

Awareness of age-related change in the context of major life events.

Although gains and losses are an integral part of human development, the experience of change and readjustment that often comes with major life events may be particularly influential for an individual's subjective aging experience and awareness of age-related change (AARC). Thus, this study focused on the role of life events in the domains of family and health for an individual's awareness of age-related gains and losses. Specifically, we differentiated between the experience of specific life events (e.

COVID-19 Worries Predict Aging Preparation: Culture- and Domain-Specific Perspectives.

Objectives: We investigated whether worrying about coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) predicts people's engagement in aging preparation. Furthermore, we expected that this association would have culture- (i.e.

COVID-19 and perceiving finitude: Associations with future time perspective, death anxiety, and ideal life expectancy.

The coronavirus pandemic threatens the health, future, and life of individuals and might hence accentuate perceptions of the fragility and finitude of life. We investigated how different perceptions of the pandemic (regarding the virus as a health threat and perceiving social and financial restrictions due to the pandemic) relate to different perceptions of life's finitude (i.e.

Aging-related fears and their associations with ideal life expectancy.

Fears regarding various aspects tend to stimulate individuals to escape or to avoid the sources of the threat. We concluded that fears associated with the future aging process, like the fear of aging-related diseases, the fear of loneliness in old age, and the fear of death, would stimulate patterns of avoidance when it comes to ideal life expectancy. We expected fear of aging-related diseases and fear of loneliness in old age to be related to lower ideal life expectancies.

Daily experiences of subjective age discordance and well-being.

Subjective age discordance (SAD) captures the difference between how old one feels and how old one would ideally like to be. We investigated the presence, strength, and fluctuation of this discordance in daily life as well as its relationship to various indicators of physical and psychological well-being with an 8-day diary study. Participants were 116 older and 107 younger adults who completed daily measures of felt age, ideal age, positive and negative affect, physical symptoms, and stressors.

Perceived personal deadlines for late-life preparation across adulthood.

Throughout adulthood, individuals follow personal timetables of deadlines that shape the course of aging. We examine 6-year-longitudinal data of perceived personal deadlines for starting with late-life preparation across adulthood. Findings are based on a sample of 518 adults between 18 and 88 years of age.

The Role of Personality in Becoming Aware of Age-Related Changes.

Awareness of age-related change (AARC) refers to an individual's conscious knowledge about the gains and losses resulting from growing older. Personality traits reflect dispositional patterns of behavior, perception, and evaluation and should therefore influence the experience of AARC. The 4.

Personal ideals of aging and longevity: The role of subjective discordances.

Following theoretical models on wishful thinking, we investigated (a) whether personal aging ideals are discordant from self-perceptions of aging, (b) how such aging discordances evolve across adulthood, (c) whether current aging discordances are related to anticipated future aging discordances, and (d) whether aging discordances are related to a lower psychological well-being. We captured subjective age discordance (SAD) as the discrepancy between current perceived age and ideal age, and we captured subjective life-expectancy discordance (SLED) as the discrepancy between perceived life expectancy and ideal life expectancy. For the analyses, we used cross-sectional data from 1,015 individuals ( = 40.

Motivation for Longevity Across the Life Span: An Emerging Issue.

Over the past decades, increases in life expectancy in most modern societies have raised questions about whether and to what extent individuals value possible extensions of their personal lifetime. In this vein, a new field of research emerged that investigates the determinants, concomitants, and consequences of longevity values and personal preferences for an extended lifetime across adulthood. Based on a review of available theoretical and empirical work, we identified 3 mindsets on the challenges and potentials of human longevity common in research as well as personal views: (a) an mindset that builds on ideal principles of an infinite life, aimed at conquering or significantly postponing a biologically determined aging process, (b) a mindset that appraises aging as being primarily based on quality of health, and (c) a mindset that associates longevity and lifetime extension with the experience of grace and meaning.

Worse or even better than expected? Outcome expectancies and behavioral experiences in the context of physical activity among cancer patients.

Expectancies of cancer patients regarding their physical activity before they took part in a behavior change intervention were compared with their experiences during the intervention period. A total of 66 cancer patients completed either a randomly assigned 4-week physical activity or a stress-management counseling intervention. On average, participants had positive expectancies toward physical activity.

Mindful vs. mind full: Processing strategies moderate the association between subjective aging experiences and depressive symptoms.

Recent evidence suggests that the longitudinal association between subjective aging experiences, that is, the way people perceive and evaluate their aging process, and well-being-related developmental outcomes depends on individual differences. We investigated the moderating role of two processing strategies, that is, mindfulness and negative repetitive thought (RT), for the association between subjective aging experiences and depressive symptoms in middle and old adulthood. Analyses were based on two measurements covering a 4.