The authors examined how age differences in strategy selection are related to associative learning deficits and metacognitive variables, including memory ability confidence. In Experiment 1, increases in memory reliance for performance of the noun-pair lookup task were compared with increases in noun-pair memory ability. In Experiment 2, memory reliance was assessed for noun pairs memorized pri...

Contributions of self-reported health to adult age differences in perceptual speed and memory were assessed for 301 adults ages 20-90. Participants were asked 4 health status questions, given 3 perceptual speed tests, 2 working memory tests, and 2 memory tests. Self-reported health was found to predict speed better than it predicted memory. Covariance structural equation modeling was used to as...

Three studies investigated (a) the plausibility of the claim that increasing the processing demands in a memory task contributes to greater involvement of a central processor and (b) the effects of altering reliance on the central processor on the magnitude of age-related differences in working-memory tasks. In the first study, young adults performed versions of 2 tasks presumed to vary in the ...

We investigated the hypothesis that age differences in speech discrimination would be reduced by enhancing the distinctiveness of the speech processing event in terms of both the context of encoding and the response outcome. Younger and older adults performed an auditory lexical decision task in which the degree of semantic constraint (context) and type of feedback were manipulated. Main effect...

Tasks assessing theory of mind (ToM) and non-mental state control tasks were administered to young and older adults to examine previous contradictory findings about age differences in mental state decoding. Age differences were found on a verbal ToM task after controlling for vocabulary levels. Older adults achieved significantly lower scores than did younger adults on static and dynamic visual...

The present studies were designed to examine age differences in memory when attention was divided during encoding, retrieval, or at both times. In Experiment 1, Ss studied categorized words while performing a number-monitoring task during encoding, retrieval, or at both times. Older Ss' free recall and clustering performance declined more than that of young Ss when attention was divided at enco...

The present study addresses the issue of age differences in 5 personality domains across the life span in a cross-sectional study. In contrast to most previous studies, the present study follows a methodologically more rigorous approach to warrant that age-related differences in personality structure and mean level can be meaningfully compared. It uses data on 50 items of the Five-Factor Person...

We propose that a comprehensive understanding of age differences in affective responses to emotional situations requires the distinction of 2 components of affect dynamics: reactivity, the deviation from a person's baseline, and recovery, the return to this baseline. The present study demonstrates the utility of this approach with a focus on age differences in responses of negative affect and h...

This study examined age differences in daily life events related to different types of social goals based on the socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), and determined whether the positivity effect existed in the context of social goals in older adults' daily lives. Over a course of 14 days, 49 older adults and 36 younger adults wrote about up to three life events daily and rated the valence o...

OBJECTIVES Previous studies have observed a rebound of marital quality in later adulthood. This study tested whether partner discrepancy was a mediator of the age differences in marital quality. METHOD The present study assessed partner discrepancies and marital quality in 56 couples, 20-79 years old. Two levels of partner standards (ideal and expected standards) and 2 domains of partner char...