Psychology and Aging最新文献

With the global aging of the population, the importance of understanding the characteristics and mechanisms of developmental changes in later life has grown. The present study explored age-related differences in the effect of emotion on judgments of learning (JOLs) in Chinese participants and delved deeper into the mechanisms underlying this effect. Experiment 1 observed that older participants showed a positivity effect on JOLs, whereas young participants demonstrated an emotional salience effect on JOLs, reflecting age-related differences in the effect of emotion on JOLs. To investigate the mechanisms underlying these age-related differences, Experiment 2 measured participants' metamemory beliefs about the effect of emotion on memory and found that older participants held a belief of the positivity effect, whereas young participants possessed a belief of the emotional salience effect. Experiment 3 collected data of beliefs and JOLs from the same participants and provided further evidence highlighting the contribution of metamemory beliefs to age-related differences in the effect of emotion on JOLs. These findings are essential for advancing the theoretical framework of metamemory and for extending lifespan theory of socioemotional selectivity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Eye movement research in Chinese shows that young adults encode character order flexibly during parafoveal processing and that word predictability can influence this early processing stage. Whether these effects change in older age is unclear, although other research suggests older readers have reduced parafoveal processing capabilities. Using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), we compared eye movement data from 60 young adults (18-30 years) with new data from 36 older adults (65-75 years). Participants read sentences with two-character target words of high or low predictability. Before their gaze crossed an invisible boundary, target words were presented normally (valid preview) or with characters transposed or replaced by unrelated characters (invalid previews). Previews reverted to normal once their gaze crossed the boundary. Our results reveal a larger word predictability effect for the older readers, while transposed-character effects were similar across groups, suggesting this intriguing aspect of parafoveal processing is preserved in aging readers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Listeners adapt to diverse cues in real-time language processing. While younger adults can learn and adapt in complex multitalker settings, it remains uncertain whether this ability persists in older adults, especially when they must accumulate auditory inputs to learn novel statistics. We examined whether older adults adapt to talker-specific patterns using paralinguistic cues such as disfluency. In two experiments, older adults listened to instructions from two talkers: one used disfluency predictively (e.g., always referring to novel objects following disfluency) and the other used disfluency unpredictably (e.g., referring to either familiar or novel objects following disfluency). Experiment 1 examined a single-talker setting (N = 50, between-subjects), and Experiment 2 examined a multitalker setting (N = 50, within-subjects). Participants' eye movements were compared between the predictive and nonpredictive conditions. In Experiment 1, older adults demonstrated partner-specific adaptation by looking at novel images more in the predictive condition than in the nonpredictive condition. However, this partner-specific adaptation was not observed in Experiment 2. The results suggest that while older adults can adapt to simpler single-talker settings, their ability to learn and apply novel statistics specific to each talker diminishes in more complex multitalker settings. This limitation may stem from slower processing speed and decreased cognitive flexibility, which may lead older adults to rely on global statistics rather than partner-specific ones. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

People who migrate at a later age are vulnerable to loneliness: They are challenged to maintain social ties in the origin country while establishing new ties in the destination. In the present study, we investigate (a) the differences in loneliness levels between retirement migrants and older adults who reside in their country of origin (nonmigrants) and (b) the determinants of emotional and social loneliness among retirement migrants. We employ the survey of Dutch retirement migrants abroad (DRM, 2021: Henkens et al., 2022), including 4,995 Dutch retirement migrants residing in 40 destination countries and 1,338 nonmigrants residing in the Netherlands (aged 66-90). Our results showed that retirement migrants were socially lonelier than nonmigrants; however, they were not emotionally lonelier. Among retirement migrants, those who had lost contact with good friends in the country of origin were both emotionally and socially lonelier. Retirement migrants who had more neighbor contact and a higher sense of belonging to the destination were emotionally and socially less lonely. Furthermore, those who had lost contact with their children and had a higher sense of belonging to the Netherlands were emotionally lonelier. The present study presents new insights into the interplay between aging and migration by using a unique representative survey of individuals who migrated at a later age to a new country and points to the risks of the increasingly popular phenomenon of international retirement migration. Differences in levels and predictors of emotional and social loneliness highlight the importance of studying these dimensions separately. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Negative views of aging (VoA) present a motivational barrier to healthy aging. Although prior interventions have demonstrated success in making adults' negative VoA more positive, reliance on self-report-based explicit measures is insufficient to examine whether these interventions also affected individuals' implicit VoA. Thus, this study assessed the impact of the AgingPLUS program, a 4-week psychoeducational intervention, on implicit measures of VoA in a randomized controlled trial. Participants aged 45-75 years (M_age = 60.1 years, SD_age = 8.3) were randomized to either the AgingPLUS program (n = 162) or a health education control group (n = 173). Implicit VoA were assessed using two computer-administered tasks: the Implicit Association Test and a lexical decision-making task. Data on implicit VoA were collected at baseline and two follow-up assessments over a 32-week period and analyzed using linear mixed-effects models. The results showed limited evidence of temporal changes or group differences regarding implicit VoA. However, participants with more positive baseline implicit VoA demonstrated greater improvements in explicit VoA, particularly in their awareness of age-related gains. Overall, explicit intervention approaches, such as the AgingPLUS program, can lead to substantial improvements in adults' self-reported VoA, although their effect on implicit VoA remains unclear. The findings underscore the importance of future interventions to (a) evaluate both explicit and implicit VoA and (b) tailor intervention designs to specific outcomes to achieve sustained, long-term positive changes in negative VoA. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Age-related changes in cognitive and biological processes mean that older adults show markedly lower performance on cognitive assessments than younger adults. Characterizing the precise nature of age-related differences in cognitive performance and whether they vary as a function of key demographic characteristics has been challenging due to small effect sizes, underpowered samples, and blunt analysis methods. In the present study, we address these issues by using a massive cross-sectional data set of approximately 750,000 English-speaking participants who completed at least one battery from the NeuroCognitive Performance Test. We employ stacked ensembles, a machine learning approach, to model differences in age-related cognitive performance from 25 to 80 years based on gender and education. We utilize bootstrapping to quantify uncertainties and compare predicted performances across age, gender, education, and subtest while accounting for data variability. We then use clustering techniques to identify cognitive subtests with similar patterns across demographics. Our novel approach reveals several notable trends. For example, tasks reliant on semantic knowledge and fluid reasoning, such as completing patterns or arithmetic word problems, exhibit similar education-dependent variation. On tasks where men outperform women at early ages, men's predicted performance also shows greater decline across the age range, resulting in a narrower or nonexistent gender gap at older ages. We discuss additional age, gender, and education interactions, as well as variations in the magnitude and onset age of change in the predicted slope of performance, most of which appear dependent on the specific cognitive area being evaluated. Implications for theories of aging are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Research has long shown that men suffer more from romantic breakups than women. We predicted that men would on average be less inclined to initiate separation, decline with the separation more in well-being and increase more in loneliness, are less satisfied with singlehood, and desire a new partner more than women. We theorized that these gender differences in separation adaptation could be linked to men's higher reliance on their partners for emotional support. Because socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that with age people shift toward more fulfilling social connections, we also expected men's dependency on their partners for emotional support to be smaller in midlife than in young adulthood. To examine our hypotheses, we analyzed multiyear within-person longitudinal change data from 1,530 mostly unmarried participants from the annual German pairfam study who had experienced a relationship dissolution. We applied propensity score matching to compare separation-related changes in well-being and loneliness to case-matched controls who remained in a romantic relationship. Results showed that men relative to women were less likely to initiate separation, less satisfied with singlehood, and wished for a partner more. In contrast to our expectations, the gender differences observed did not differ by age, and no gender differences were found in separation-related changes in well-being and loneliness. Dissolution-related effects on well-being were only evident for marital relationships, while dissolution-related effects on loneliness were equally strong for marital and nonmarital dissolutions. Our study suggests that previous findings on gender-specific divorce-induced changes in well-being may not generalize to nonmarital dissolutions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The study of whether temporal processing in the millisecond-to-seconds range changes with age is an active and debated research field. Here, we adopted a lifespan approach in which younger to older participants performed both explicit and implicit timing tasks (time bisection and foreperiod tasks, respectively) in a single session. Three hundred seven participants (age range: 20-85 years) took part in the study. Participants performed two timing tasks to test explicit and implicit time processing. Age was used as a continuous predictor to elucidate whether explicit and implicit temporal processing change with increasing age. The results from the explicit timing task showed reduced precision with age, as indexed by a flatter psychometric curve and greater just noticeable difference metrics. By contrast, implicit processing of time was not significantly affected by age, as evinced by a comparable foreperiod effect across age. These findings provide first adult lifespan evidence that only explicit, but not implicit, timing is sensitive to age-related changes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Recently, a distinction has been drawn between conventional false memories, which misrepresent specific facts, and deep distortions, which misrepresent relations that connect facts. We report the first study of adult developmental trends in deep distortions, using a paradigm in which people make conjoint recognition judgments about incompatible facts (e.g., Was Einstein born in Austria, Germany, or Switzerland?). As conventional false memories increase over the adult lifespan, it is natural to expect that deep distortions will do likewise. Surprisingly, however, the modal explanation of adult increases in false memory predicts that deep distortions will be developmentally invariant. We tested that prediction in two experiments that measured three deep distortions (violations of the logical laws of additivity, countable additivity, and universal event) in memory for real-world incompatibility relations (e.g., size of planets, geographical location of companies, people in historical events). In Experiment 1, robust violations of all three laws were detected in younger adults (N = 105; M_age = 20), and as predicted, those violations did not increase in adults (N = 182; Mage = 33) or older adults (N = 176; M_age = 62). Experiment 2 was designed to test whether deep distortions would increase with age when there was stronger support for retrieving verbatim memories, but once again, deep distortion levels were the same in young adults (N = 81; M_age = 19), adults (N = 167; M_age = 34), and older adults (N = 170; M_age = 62). Conjoint recognition analyses revealed that throughout the adult lifespan, verbatim memory played no role in deep distortions. Other analyses revealed that although incompatible facts are perfectly compensatory in the real world (Einstein could only be born in Germany to the extent that he was not born in Austria or Switzerland), memory for incompatible facts is noncompensatory throughout the adult lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

According to the Flynn effect, performance on cognitive ability tests has improved over the past decades. However, we know very little about whether such historical improvements generalize to middle-aged adults (aged 45-65) and differ across nations. We used harmonized data on episodic memory from nationally representative longitudinal panel surveys across a total of 16 countries (United States, Mexico, China, England, and countries in Continental, Mediterranean, and Nordic Europe). We compared historical change in age-related trajectories of episodic memory among middle-aged adults. Our sample included 117,231 participants who provided 330,390 observations. Longitudinal multilevel regression models revealed that today's middle-aged adults in the United States perform worse on episodic memory tests than their peers in the past. By contrast, today's middle-aged adults in most other countries perform better on these tests than their peers in the past. However, later-born cohorts of U.S. and Chinese middle-aged adults experienced less steep within-person decrements-or even increments-in episodic memory than earlier born cohorts. Historical change trends persisted when controlling for sociodemographic factors, as well as for indicators of physical and mental health. Differences in episodic memory by gender and education became smaller over historical time across all nations. Our findings suggest that countries differ considerably in episodic memory performance, by more than half a standard deviation, and in the direction and size of how midlife episodic memory trajectories have changed over historical time. Further factors related to historical changes in midlife episodic memory need to be identified by future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).