Age differences in emotional responses to daily stress: the role of timing, severity, and global perceived stress.

Research on age differences in emotional responses to daily stress has produced inconsistent findings. Guided by recent theoretical advances in aging theory (S. T.

Age-related differences in altruism across adulthood: making personal financial gain versus contributing to the public good.

Four studies utilizing different methodological approaches investigated adult age-related differences in altruism (i.e., contributions to the public good) and the self-centered value of increasing personal wealth.

Age-related differences in event-related potentials for early visual processing of emotional faces.

With advancing age, processing resources are shifted away from negative emotional stimuli and toward positive ones. Here, we explored this 'positivity effect' using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants identified the presence or absence of a visual probe that appeared over photographs of emotional faces.

Linking Process and Outcome in the Study of Emotion and Aging.

Current theory and research on emotion and aging suggests that (a) older adults report more positive affective experience (more happiness) than younger adults, (b) older adults attend to and remember emotionally valenced stimuli differently than younger adults (i.e., they show age-related positivity effects in attention and memory), and (c) the reason that older adults have more positive affective experience is because the positivity effects they display serve as emotion regulatory strategies.

If only I had taken my usual route…: age-related differences in counter-factual thinking.

Previous research suggests that young adults can shift between rational and experiential modes of thinking when forming social judgments. The present study examines whether older adults demonstrate this flexibility in thinking. Young and older adults completed an If-only task adapted from Epstein, Lipson, and Huh's (1992 , Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 328) examination of individuals' ability to adopt rational or experiential modes of thought while making a judgment about characters who experience a negative event that could have been avoided.

Violate my beliefs? Then you're to blame! Belief content as an explanation for causal attribution biases.

We examined the extent to which the content of beliefs about appropriate behavior in social situations influences blame attributions for negative outcomes in relationship situations. Young, middle-aged, and older adults indicated their level of agreement to a set of traditional and nontraditional beliefs. Five months later, we assessed the degree to which these same individuals blamed traditional and nontraditional characters who violated their beliefs in 12 social conflict situations.

Problem-solving variability in older spouses: how is it linked to problem-, person-, and couple-characteristics?

Problem-solving does not take place in isolation and often involves social others such as spouses. Using repeated daily life assessments from 98 older spouses (M age = 72 years; M marriage length = 42 years), the present study examined theoretical notions from social-contextual models of coping regarding (a) the origins of problem-solving variability and (b) associations between problem-solving and specific problem-, person-, and couple- characteristics. Multilevel models indicate that the lion's share of variability in everyday problem-solving is located at the level of the problem situation.

Is longing only for Germans? A cross-cultural comparison of Sehnsucht in Germany and the United States.

Sehnsucht, the longing or yearning for ideal yet seemingly unreachable states of life, is a salient topic in German culture and has proven useful for understanding self-regulation across adulthood in a German sample (e.g., Scheibe, Freund, & Baltes, 2007).

Beliefs about behavior account for age differences in the correspondence bias.

Objectives: Older adults tend to exhibit the correspondence bias to a greater extent than young adults. The current study examined whether these age differences are a function of the degree to which an individual subscribes to a lay theory of attitude-behavior consistency.

Methods: First, participants responded to questions regarding their beliefs about attitude-behavior consistency.

Anger management: age differences in emotional modulation of visual processing.

Although positive and negative images enhance the visual processing of young adults, recent work suggests that a life-span shift in emotion processing goals may lead older adults to avoid negative images. To examine this tendency for older adults to regulate their intake of negative emotional information, the current study investigated age-related differences in the perceptual boost received by probes appearing over facial expressions of emotion. Visually-evoked event-related potentials were recorded from the scalp over cortical regions associated with visual processing as a probe appeared over facial expressions depicting anger, sadness, happiness, or no emotion.

Goals and everyday problem solving: manipulating goal preferences in young and older adults.

In the present study, we examined the link between goal and problem-solving strategy preferences in 130 young and older adults using hypothetical family problem vignettes. At baseline, young adults preferred autonomy goals, whereas older adults preferred generative goals. Imagining an expanded future time perspective led older adults to show preferences for autonomy goals similar to those observed in young adults but did not eliminate age differences in generative goals.

Introduction to the special section on intraindividual variability and aging.

This preface introduces articles that appear in the special section on intraindividual variability and aging and illustrate what intraindividual variability might contribute to the study of development. These articles exemplify the variety of conceptual perspectives, analytical methods, and types of data that are being used to study intraindividual variability and illustrate what the study of intraindividual variability might contribute to the study of development.

Flexible and adaptive socio-emotional problem solving in adult development and aging.

Purpose: Despite decline in basic cognitive mechanisms, aging adults may also possess abilities that allow them to function quite effectively, particularly when cognition is examined in a socio-emotional context. In this article, I highlight the importance of the functional dynamics or the ability to effectively adapt to the demands and opportunities that individuals are confronted with on an everyday basis.

Methods: This overview takes into consideration how life experiences, social interactions, beliefs, and emotions influence motivational goals for processing information in daily life.

Effects of regulating emotions on cognitive performance: what is costly for young adults is not so costly for older adults.

The authors examined whether instructions to regulate emotions after a disgust-inducing film clip created an equally costly cognitive load across adulthood. Young and older adults across all instructional conditions initially demonstrated increased working memory performance after mood induction, typical of practice effects. Age-group differences emerged at the 2nd postinduction trial.

The experience of anger and sadness in everyday problems impacts age differences in emotion regulation.

The authors examined regulation of the discrete emotions anger and sadness in adolescents through older adults in the context of describing everyday problem situations. The results support previous work; in comparison to younger age groups, older adults reported that they experienced less anger and reported that they used more passive and fewer proactive emotion-regulation strategies in interpersonal situations. The experience of anger partially mediated age differences in the use of proactive emotion regulation.

Emotion regulation in interpersonal problems: the role of cognitive-emotional complexity, emotion regulation goals, and expressivity.

Young, middle-aged, and older adults' emotion regulation strategies in interpersonal problems were examined. Participants imagined themselves in anger- or sadness-eliciting situations with a close friend. Factor analyses of a new questionnaire supported a 4-factor model of emotion regulation strategies, including passivity, expressing emotions, seeking emotional information or support, and solving the problem.

Challenges older adults face in detecting deceit: the role of emotion recognition.

Facial expressions of emotion are key cues to deceit (M. G. Frank & P.

Cultural differences in the relationship between aging and the correspondence bias.

Previous work suggests that older adults show a stronger correspondence bias than do young adults. In the present study we examine whether age differences in the correspondence bias are universal or if they differ across cultures. A sample of young and older adults from China completed an attitude-attribution paradigm.

Goals and everyday problem solving: examining the link between age-related goals and problem-solving strategy use.

Qualitative interviews on family and financial problems from 332 adolescents, young, middle-aged, and older adults, demonstrated that developmentally relevant goals predicted problem-solving strategy use over and above problem domain. Four focal goals concerned autonomy, generativity, maintaining good relationships with others, and changing another person. We examined both self- and other-focused problem-solving strategies.

Age differences in everyday problem-solving effectiveness: older adults select more effective strategies for interpersonal problems.

Using the Everyday Problem Solving Inventory of Cornelius and Caspi, we examined differences in problem-solving strategy endorsement and effectiveness in two domains of everyday functioning (instrumental or interpersonal, and a mixture of the two domains) and for four strategies (avoidance-denial, passive dependence, planful problem solving, and cognitive analysis). Consistent with past research, our research showed that older adults were more problem focused than young adults in their approach to solving instrumental problems, whereas older adults selected more avoidant-denial strategies than young adults when solving interpersonal problems. Overall, older adults were also more effective than young adults when solving everyday problems, in particular for interpersonal problems.

Psychology and Aging: the first 20 years.

This article provides a review of the first 20 years of Psychology and Aging, the American Psychological Association's first and only scholarly journal devoted to the topic of aging. The authors briefly summarize its history, its contributions to the study of aging, and its broader status as a scholarly publication. One theme highlighted in our review is the diversity of content in the journal throughout its history.

The differential effects of mood on age differences in the correspondence bias.

The present study found that age-related differences in the correspondence bias were differentially influenced by induced mood. Young and older adults completed an attitude-attribution task after having been induced to experience a positive, neutral, or negative mood. Although negative moods intensified age-related differences in the correspondence bias, young and older adults were equally susceptible to the correspondence bias when in a positive mood.

Age differences in the correspondence bias: when a plausible explanation matters.

We examined the degree to which the dispositional biases observed in older adults reflect their use of the situational information available to them. Using the paradigm of Jones and Harris, we had young, middle-aged, and older adults read essays that were written under constrained or unconstrained conditions and estimate the writer's attitude. Middle-aged and older adults demonstrated a larger correspondence bias, that is, inferring the target's true attitude to be consistent with the essay content in the no-choice condition.

Age differences in blame attributions: the role of relationship outcome ambiguity and personal identification.

Two social factors that could influence age differences in blame attributions were examined: relationship outcome ambiguity (ROA) and personal identification with the characters. ROA is the degree of uncertainty as to the successful resolution of a relationship dilemma. Blame attributions were examined individually for primary and secondary characters in the vignettes.