OBJECTIVES Two studies examined the extent to which the age-related positivity effect in autobiographical recall is the result of age differences in appraisal and memory. METHODS In Study 1, older and younger participants reported 1 pleasant and 1 unpleasant event for 5 days. Participants attempted to recall those events a week later. In Study 2, older and younger participants imagined that p...

This study is concerned with the development of companionship and intimacy. Subjects in the second, fifth, and eighth grades (mean ages, respectively, 7.5, 10.4, and 13.4) rated the importance and extent of companionship and intimate disclosure experienced in social life in general and in each of 8 types of relationships. Companionship was perceived as a desired social provision at all 3 grade ...

To remember everyday activity it is important to encode it effectively, and one important component of everyday activity is that it consists of events. People who segment activity into events more adaptively have better subsequent memory for that activity, and event boundaries are remembered better than event middles. The current study asked whether intervening to improve segmentation by cuing ...

In a typical reversal-learning experiment, one learns stimulus-outcome contingencies that then switch without warning. For instance, participants might have to repeatedly choose between two faces, one of which yields points whereas the other does not, with a reversal at some point in which face yields points. The current study examined age differences in the effects of outcome type on reversal ...

Studies have found that older compared with young adults are less able to identify facial expressions and have worse memory for negative than for positive faces, but those studies have used only young faces. Studies finding that both age groups are more accurate at recognizing faces of their own than other ages have used mostly neutral faces. Thus, age differences in processing faces may not ex...

In 3 experiments, we investigated the hypothesis that age-related differences in working memory might be due to the inability to bind content with context. Participants were required to find a repeating stimulus within a single series (no context memory required) or within multiple series (necessitating memory for context). Response time and accuracy were examined in 2 task domains: verbal and ...

The magnitude of age differences on event- and time-based prospective memory tasks was investigated in 2 experiments. Participants performed a working memory task and were also required to perform either an event- or time-based prospective action. Control participants performed either the working memory task only or the prospective memory task only. Results yielded age differences on both prosp...

Although previous research has shown that positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) modulate attentional functioning in distinct ways, few studies have considered whether the links between affect and attentional functioning may vary as a function of age. Using the Attention Network Test (Fan et al., 2002), we tested whether participants' current state of PA and NA influenced distinct attent...

BACKGROUND: Fatigue and workload experienced by aircraft de-icing personnel have been largely neglected in occupational health and safety research. OBJECTIVE: To provide an initial assessment of fatigue and workload among de-icing ground crews. METHODS: Company records were used to reveal possible relationships between different variables (age, seniority, truck type, and work shift). A group of...

We investigated the contribution of cognitive ability and affect to age differences in sequential decision making by asking younger and older adults to shop for items in a computerized sequential decision-making task. Older adults performed poorly compared to younger adults partly due to searching too few options. An analysis of the decision process with a formal model suggested that older adul...