Trying to learn sometimes impairs implicit learning of artificial grammars and of control systems. We asked whether such negative effects of trying also occur in implicit learning of subtle sequential regularities and whether such effects vary with adult age. Young (n = 12, age = 20-23) and older (n = 24, age = 60-80) adults completed an alternating serial response time task in which predictabl...

Measuring fun and enjoyment with children is not trivial. Subjective measures are known to suffer from an experimenter effect and often lack detail in their answering. The experimenter effect refers to answering in accordance with the expectations of the experimenter rather than reflecting the opinion of the subject. The lack of detail in answering is due to the oft-found finding (which we will...

We explored age differences in the amount of personal effort that people put forth to maintain relationships across adulthood in diverse family-life contexts. More specifically, we examined how personal effort in social relationships is age-differently related to emotional closeness and perceptions of reciprocity. A total of 658 early-midlife (37 years) and old-age adults (73 years) from three ...

OBJECTIVE Older adults often appraise and remember events less negatively than younger adults. These tendencies may influence reports that rely more on nonexperiential, reconstructive processes. As such, the current study examined whether age differences may be more pronounced for reports of emotions that span across increasingly longer temporal epochs compared to reports of more proximal emoti...

The present study addressed contradictory results in childhood literature about conceptual priming. Based on the processing view, two forms of conceptual priming were investigated across two experiments in children aged from 7 to 16: associative priming (using the free-association test) and relational (categorical) priming (using the categorical exemplar generation test) as well as their explic...

When presented with several time-compressed sentences, young adults' performance improves with practice. Such adaptation has not been studied in older adults. To study age-related changes in perceptual learning, the authors tested young and older adults' ability to adapt to degraded speech. First, the authors showed that older adults, when equated for starting accuracy with young adults, adapte...

We investigated the role of training-induced knowledge schemas and encoding time on adult age differences in recall. High-plausible (schema coherent) words were recalled better than low-plausible (schema discrepant) words in both age groups. This difference was larger for old adults than for young adults for presentation times ranging from 3 s to 11 s per word. After equating participants in ov...

This study investigated the hypothesis that age differences in memory performance may be influenced by stereotype threat associated with negative cultural beliefs about the impact of aging on memory. Recall was examined in 48 young and 48 older adults under conditions varying in the degree of induced threat. Conditions that maximize threat resulted in lower performance in older adults relative ...

When faced with interpersonal conflict, older adults report using passive strategies more often than do young adults. They also report less affective reactivity in response to these tensions. We examined whether the use of passive strategies may explain age-related reductions in affective reactivity to interpersonal tensions. Over 8 consecutive evenings, participants (N = 1,031; 25-74 years-old...

This paper examines both gender and age differences in the labor supply of households in Jordan, as well as the impact of young women’s employment on gender and generation relations. The objective of the study is to address the issues of gender and generation as factors influencing accessibility to labor markets, and to provide a broader understanding of female employment by exploring age-relat...