Psychology and Aging最新文献

With increasing percentages of the population in retirement, or approaching retirement, it is important to better understand how an individual's health and well-being may change during the retirement transition and for whom this transition may be particularly beneficial or problematic. Toward this end, the present study evaluated borderline personality disorder features as predictors of well-being and health trajectories from pre-to-post retirement, using up to seven waves of longitudinal data from the St. Louis Personality and Aging Network study. Participants were 590 older adults (aged 55-65, M = 60.6 at baseline) who retired over the course of their participation in the study (55% women, 45% men; 65% White/Caucasian, 32% Black/African American). Nonlinear change models were used to assess participants' patterns of life satisfaction, physical functioning, and depressive symptoms throughout the retirement transition. Results showed that older adults with higher borderline personality disorder features tended to report worse well-being and health in general. However, counter to expectations, there was limited evidence suggesting that the retirement transition yielded differential trajectories for health and well-being based on borderline personality disorder features. Notably, there were modest moderation effects observed for depressive symptoms. Key findings are discussed in terms of how the current work contributes to the field's existing understanding of retirement as a significant life transition affecting personal well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Considering the critical role of working memory (WM) in age-related cognitive decline, WM interventions are proposed as an effective approach for promoting healthy aging. However, traditional WM interventions often yield limited results, possibly due to a lack of interest and challenge. In light of the recent prominent trend of gamification, this study developed a challenging gamified WM intervention aimed at improving WM and providing extensive cognitive benefits for older adults, along with entertainment. Seventy-six older adults were randomly assigned to either the WM intervention group or the active control group. All participants underwent twelve 1-hr training sessions spanning 6 weeks. For each participant, cognitive assessments were completed at pretest, posttest, and 6 months after the intervention while structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and resting-state functional MRI scans were conducted before and after intervention. The results revealed significant improvements in WM, inhibitory control, visuospatial processing, and episodic memory among older adults following the intervention. The left frontal pole, located in the rostral prefrontal cortex (rPFC), exhibited increased cortical thickness accompanied by reduced functional homogeneity and weakened connectivity with the left inferior temporal gyrus. Further statistical learning analysis demonstrated a consistent relationship between the changes at the left frontal pole and improved WM performance, suggesting that the rPFC may support WM and play a protective role in brain aging. The findings highlight the broad benefits of the gamified WM intervention on neurocognitive plasticity in the rPFC of older adults, indicating its potential as a promising tool for mitigating neurocognitive decline during the aging process. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Route retracing (i.e., returning to your start location) is critical for successful navigation in everyday life. While age-related impairment in traversing a route from a start location to target destination has been well-established, age differences in the ability to reverse a previously learned path has been less examined. Previous work found that studying a map facilitates better route retracing for older adults than studying a route from an egocentric perspective during initial learning. However, the mechanism for this benefit is unclear. This study examined whether facilitating allocentric representation, egocentric perspective taking, or temporal sequencing would benefit route retracing performance in younger (n = 69; aged 18-36) and older (n = 70; aged 61-85) adults. In addition, the role of individual differences in allocentric representation development, egocentric perspective taking, temporal sequencing, procedural learning, as well as hippocampal and caudate volume in route performance was examined. Older adults benefited from developing an allocentric representation of the environment and simultaneous exposure to landmark temporal order when reversing a route but did not show a benefit from minimizing demands on egocentric perspective taking. Both cognitive map formation and egocentric perspective taking tasks were each more strongly associated with route retracing than route repetition across age groups. Results suggest that older adults may benefit from specific strategies to develop and retain a flexible environmental representation, which would allow for successful route retracing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

While risky decision making is often studied using decisions with relatively affect-poor outcomes (typically moderate amounts of money), many decisions in the real world elicit higher levels of affect (e.g., medical decisions). Research suggests that choices diverge between relatively affect-rich decisions and relatively affect-poor monetary decisions. However, it is unknown to what extent this "affect gap" holds in older adults, who make some of the most consequential medical and financial decisions among the population and have been shown to process affect differently than younger adults. In the present study, we compared decision quality and risk attitude in affect-rich choice problems (with medical side effects as possible outcomes) to that in structurally identical and economically matched affect-poor choice problems (with monetary losses as possible outcomes) in 100 older (aged 65-80 years, M = 69.7) and 100 younger (aged 18-29 years, M = 23.5) adults. Replicating previous findings on the affect gap, individuals were more risk averse (odds ratio [OR] = 1.52) and made worse quality decisions (OR = 2.13) for affect-rich than for affect-poor problems. Importantly, this pattern emerged very similarly for younger and older adults. Computational modeling with cumulative prospect theory indicated that participants tended to weight probability information less strongly for affect-rich than for affect-poor choices, regardless of age. Yet, while younger adults were more sensitive to differences in affect-rich than in affect-poor outcomes, older adults showed similar sensitivity to differences in affect-rich and affect-poor outcomes. These findings demonstrate the robustness of the affect gap across age groups and have implications for risk communication. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Almost all prior literature on affective forecasting in older age has focused exclusively on discrete outcomes in nonsocial contexts (such as winning monetary rewards) and not a single study to date has examined age-related differences in affective forecasting in social contexts. Because close social relationships are prioritized as people age, the present study was designed to provide the first test of how younger and older adults forecast their emotions when anticipating an interaction with a real social partner. We recruited younger and older adults and asked them to forecast their positive and negative emotions in response to a brief face-to-face interaction with a social partner (female confederate) before reporting their actual experienced emotions after the interaction. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions in which they were either primed to perceive closeness with their conversation partner or not. Overall, older adults predicted and experienced more positive and less negative emotions relative to their younger counterparts. However, no other age effects emerged. Both age groups overestimated their negative and underanticipated their positive future emotions to a similar degree (although this latter effect was stronger in the perceived closeness vs. control condition). These findings offer support for the hypothesis that normative shifts in goal orientation and affective experience associated with aging may influence the valence of forecasted and experienced emotion and, importantly, demonstrate that affective forecasting accuracy is not negatively impacted by age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Older adults are known to prioritize unreliable facial cues (facial trustworthiness) over relevant behavioral information (behavioral evaluation) when judging trustworthiness, increasing their risk of falling victim to fraud. This study examines age-related difference in the initial preference for facial over behavioral cues, and whether older adults could overcome such biased preference through learning. An associative memory-free, rule-based one-shot trust game was used, where 104 younger adults (aged 18-28, M_age = 21.38, SD_age = 2.41; 31 males) and 105 older adults (aged 60-77, M_age = 65.55, SD_age = 4.15; 32 males) each completed 96 trials, deciding whether to invest in trustees based on their face and behavioral evaluation of trustworthiness. Computational modeling revealed that compared to younger participants, older adults relied more on perceived facial trustworthiness, rather than using the diagnostic cue of behavioral evaluation at the beginning. Nevertheless, older adults were able to learn to increase their decision weight for the diagnostic cue progressively, as younger adults did, with the feedback provided during the task. Such results showcased older adults' capability to learn the implicit rules and adjust their decisions from feedback. These findings contribute to the development of interventions aimed at preventing fraud victimization and promoting decision-making quality among older adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Spatial navigation strategies change in aging. Whereas younger adults use more shortcuts (place-based strategies), older adults use more familiar routes (response-based strategies). Does this bias in older adults reflect a preference for familiar routes or deficits in the ability to take shortcuts? We tested this question by providing an instructions-based intervention in which participants were told to take shortcuts rather than follow a learned route. We predicted that when instructed to do so, participants would increase shortcut taking overall, but older adults to a lesser extent than younger adults, supporting the notion that preference, rather than an inability to use place-based strategies, underlies the predilection for response-based strategies in older age. Younger (n = 64) and older (n = 65) adults completed two sessions of a desktop virtual navigation strategy task in which they could navigate to goal locations following a familiar route or taking a novel shortcut. In the first session, all participants received the instruction to navigate to goal locations. In the second session, half received the same instruction as before and the other half was instructed to take shortcuts. We computed participants' tendency toward place- or response-based strategies in each session. We replicated the finding that younger adults took more shortcuts when instructed; however, counter to our prediction, the instruction manipulation had no effect in older adults. These findings suggest that navigation strategy in younger adults is flexible and may reflect preference, whereas older adults more rigidly adhere to familiar routes, implying impaired or degraded survey knowledge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent studies established that engaging metacognitive monitoring via making judgments of learning (JOLs) can directly enhance young adults' recognition memory, a phenomenon termed the reactivity effect of JOLs. The present study explored the reactive influence of making JOLs on older adults' recognition memory and probed the potential age-related differences in this effect. In three experiments, participants were instructed to study four lists of words, with two lists studied with concurrent JOLs and the other two without, followed by a recognition test. The results provided strong evidence that making JOLs improves older adults' recognition performance (Experiments 1-3) through enhancing both recollection- and familiarity-based recognition (Experiment 3). But the positive reactivity effect on recognition memory for older adults was weaker than that for young adults (Experiments 2 and 3). To elucidate potential mechanisms underlying age-related differences in the reactivity effect, the present study also measured participants' learning engagement and cognitive abilities. The model results substantiated the mediating role of learning engagement, supporting the enhanced learning engagement theory, rather than the dual-task hypothesis, as an account for the reactivity effect on recognition memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This study examines whether social interactions in different modalities buffer the effects of poor self-reported health on well-being in older adults. We apply multilevel models to experience sampling data including daily assessments of health, frequency of social interactions (face-to-face, telephone, and digital text-based) and well-being (positive and negative affect, loneliness) from 118 older adults (M_age = 71.75; SD_age = 5.05). Between subjects, fewer health complaints were associated with higher well-being. Within-subjects, well-being was higher on days when subjects reported better health and fewer health complaints than their average. The findings regarding the buffering effects were inconsistent: In line with our hypothesis, on days with more face-to-face interactions, the effect of daily self-reported health on loneliness was smaller. Similarly, on days with more telephone interactions, the effects of daily self-reported health on positive affect and loneliness were smaller. Furthermore, for participants who experienced more telephone calls than others, the effect of overall health complaints on negative affect and loneliness was smaller. For participants who experienced more digital text-based social interactions than others, the effect of overall health complaints on positive affect and the effect of self-reported health on loneliness were weaker. Follow-up analyses that examined the pleasantness of social interaction as a buffering factor show that pleasantness did not buffer adverse effects of poor health on well-being more consistently than the frequency of social interactions did. Taken together, our findings show that poor health is a risk factor for well-being and social interactions in different modalities might partially buffer those adverse effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Personality is characterized by continuity and the capacity to change across the lifespan. Integrative personality frameworks imply that variability in daily life experiences has the potential to evoke longer term changes in personality over time. However, strong tests of this assumption across the adult lifespan are relatively rare. We examined the interrelations between changes in daily stress reactivity and changes in Big Five personality traits over a nearly 20-year period. Three measurement bursts from the National Study of Daily Experiences (N = 2,022; 55% female) each included daily measures of stressor exposure and negative affect across eight consecutive days (yielding 33,942 days of data across 18 years of adulthood). At each wave, participants reported on their personality traits (i.e., openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism). Multilevel structural equation modeling simultaneously modeled stress reactivity at Level 1; longitudinal changes in stress reactivity at Level 2; and the interrelations between changes in stress reactivity and changes in personality traits at Level 3. Higher reactivity at baseline was associated with lower levels of extraversion and conscientiousness and higher levels of neuroticism at baseline. Further, increases in reactivity across the 18-year period were associated with declines in extraversion, agreeableness, and openness. Changes in reactivity were not related to changes in neuroticism or conscientiousness. These findings clarify how changes in daily experiences are related to broader personality changes and inform integrative frameworks of personality development across the adult lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).