Aging and social satisfaction: offsetting positive and negative effects

Social satisfaction in late adulthood originates from competing sources. Older adults tend to be more positive and less negative than younger adults, but social contact and working memory often decrease with age, both of which might limit older adults' social functioning. In the current study of younger and older adults, these socially facilitative vs. socially debilitative changes were found to underlie stasis in social satisfaction. These findings show that the lack of an overall effect for age can mask competing changes in social functioning in late adulthood, as the sources of social satisfaction might change even if the outcome does not.     

Attributional mediators of social inhibition and avoidance

People differ in the degree to which they become inhibited and avoidant when they feel socially anxious This study explored the hypothesis that characterological attributions for one's feelings of nervousness in social settings are related to social inhibition and avoidance In a preliminary study, the dimensions people use to explain their feelings of nervousness and relaxation were determined One hundred and twenty-five subjects then completed measures of social anxiousness, inhibition, and avoidance, and made attributions for feeling nervous and relaxed in 10 interpersonal scenarios As predicted, attributions of nervousness to characterological factors, such as ability and personality traits, correlated positively with social inhibition and avoidance Unexpectedly, behavioral attributions for nervousness also predicted inhibition and avoidance     

Collaborative inhibition persists following social processing

In this experiment, participants read target words that were presented in the context of a social sentence “Willow towered over Meadow” or a nonsocial sentence “The willow towered over the meadow.” Subsequently, they received a surprise cued recall test for the target nouns/names and completed the test either alone or in a group of two. Despite the fact that the stimulus materials were held constant across conditions, participants showed a social processing advantage in memory—that is, they remembered the social (name) versions of the target words significantly better than the nonsocial (noun) versions. Further, the social benefit was not strong enough to neutralise the inhibitory effects of collaboration as collaborative groups (two people working together) recalled significantly fewer words than did nominal groups (combined, nonredundant, output of two individuals working separately). The present study also demonstrated robust collaborative inhibition with cued recall, a task previously assumed to eliminate such inhibition.     

Aging, attention, and intelligence

The aims of this study were (a) to find out if attentional ability factors that are separate from the well-established ability factors (e.g., fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, and short-term acquisition and retrieval function) can be identified, and (b) to establish, through the use of part correlations, whether attentional abilities play a role in the changes in fluid and crystallized intelligence that occur with increasing age. A battery of 36 tests (19 psychometric tests and 17 measures of attentional processes) were given to 100 people. 20 of whom were in each age decade between 20 and 70. Results indicated that three attentional factors--Search, Concentration, and Attentional Flexibility--exist at the primary-ability level and that all three define fluid intelligence at the second-order level. Results also indicate that the decline in fluid intelligence with increasing age disappears if attentional factors are parted-out. Similarly, the increase in crystallized intelligence with increasing age becomes even greater if one controls for attentional processes. I conclude that changes in attentional processes play an important part in changes in human intelligence with age.     

Aging, Memory, and Comprehension

There are changes in the ability to comprehend and remember information with aging. In general, older adults perform more poorly than younger adults at tasks that require knowledge of the information that was actually encountered. However, they can perform as well as or better than younger adults at tasks involving more global levels of understanding, such as in the use ofinformation in a situation model. This increased emphasis on situation models may serve to compensate for deficits at lower levels of processing and may be achieved through more focused selection of situation-defining information, increased dependence on schemas, and a broader generation and use of inferences.     

Aging and inhibition of a prepotent motor response during an ongoing action

Inhibitory functions are key mechanisms underlying age related decline (Park & Gutchess, 2000, in: Cognitive aging: A primer. Hove: Psychology Press), yet few studies have investigated their impact on everyday tasks involving action as well as cognition. Using an everyday-based go/no-go task we devised a motor analogy of traditional neuropsychological tests to investigate in 134 older (aged 60-88) and 133 younger adults (aged 20-59) the ability to inhibit a prepotent motor response during an ongoing action. Older adults produced more inhibition failures as expected, but more strikingly inhibitory errors were not all or none; even when the inappropriate response was successfully inhibited, difficulties controlling ongoing movements emerged from as young as people in their 40s. The ability to inhibit therefore does not ensure control of ongoing tasks, and traditional cognitive tests may be unable to detect such difficulties. Furthermore, performance did not covary with education or action speed. Implications for neuropsychological theory and assessing/enhancing functional ability are discussed.     

Children's social groups and intergroup prejudice: Assessing the influence and inhibition of social group norms

A simulation group study examined whether the effects of group norms on 7‐ and 9‐year‐old children's intergroup attitudes can be moderated by a contrary school norm. Children learnt that their school had an inclusion norm, were assigned to a group with an outgroup inclusion or exclusion norm, and indicated their ingroup and outgroup attitudes under teacher surveillance or not. Results revealed reduced outgroup liking when the group had an exclusion norm, but that the effect was moderated when the school had an inclusion norm, especially among the older children. The participants’ ingroup liking was also reduced, but teacher surveillance had no effect on attitudes. The findings are discussed in relation to possible strategies to moderate social group norm effects.     

Evaluation apprehension and the social facilitation/inhibition of learning

Sixty female subjects performed a paired-associates learning task either alone or under surveillance by the experimenter, who openly evaluated the subject's performance. To half of the subjects the experimenter described her evaluation as instrumental to the rendering of future help on a similar task; to the remaining half she gave no such promise. Subjects who were evaluated without the expectation of future help performed better than subjects who worked alone when the paired-associates list was easy, but less well when the list was difficult. For both types of list, evaluation with the added promise of future help produced performance no different from that of isolated subjects. Evaluation without the promise of help also produced a higher level of state anxiety than that observed in isolated subjects. The findings were discussed in terms of the effects of evaluation apprehension on the social facilitation and inhibition of learning.     

Behavioural inhibition and the age at social isolation in rats

Rats that were socially isolated or group-housed at weaning were re-housed at 51 days of age in either the same housing condition or the opposite housing condition until 91 days and throughout subsequent behavioural testing. Increased resistance to extinction of running in an alley and poorer Hebb-Williams maze learning were found only after social isolation between 23 and 51 days of age. In contrast, slower running to reach the water reward during alley training and lower rearing activity at the beginning of open field testing were evident only in rats that were isolated at the time of testing. As in previous studies, open field hyperactivity was found in rats isolated at weaning but slower emergence latency was found in animals isolated at the time of testing. These findings confirm that the many behavioural effects of social isolation at different ages do not reflect a unitary aetiology. The behaviour of rats isolated at weaning is suggestive of a “disinhibition syndrome” but the precise nature of this syndrome is as yet unclear.     

Stroop Interference,Practice, and Aging

We report two experiments that investigate practice effects on Stroop color-word interference in older and younger adults. Both experiments employed a computerized, single-item version of the Stroop task with a voice response, and both involved practice over hundreds of trials. Both experiments showed generally similar practice patterns, including a practice-related reduction in the size of the color-word interference effect. However, the older group continued to show a larger interference effect throughout practice. These findings indicate that older adults show the same trend in practice-related improvement on the Stroop task as younger adults.     

Aging, source memory, and misrecollections

The authors propose an illusory recollection account of why cognitive aging is associated with episodic memory deficits. After listening to statements presented by either a female or a male speaker, older adults were prone to misrecollecting past events. The authors' illusory recollection account is instantiated in a new illusory recollection signal detection model that provides a better fit of older adults' data than does the standard signal detection model. They observed that age-related differences in source memory (as measured by source d' scores) virtually disappear after accounting for the occurrence of illusory recollections. These data suggest that age-related source memory impairments are not due to older adults' remembering less diagnostic source information and having to guess more. Instead, older adults appear to misremember past events more often than younger adults.     

Behavioral Genetics, Health, and Aging

A recurring observation from studies of health in the elderly is the pervasiveness of individual differences. For many health-related endpoints, total variation appears to increase across age group; however, few longitudinal studies have reported whether these age differences reflect true age-related changes. There are a growing number of twin studies of aging that provide some insight, at least cross-sectionally, into the nature of individual differences in health. Increases in total variance most often reflect increases in environmental sources of variance. Covariation among traits reflects both genetic and environmental mediation, dependent on the sex of the sample and the measures of interest. Co-twin control approaches have been successful in exploring the role of environmental influences as risk factors for poor health. The most serious limitation to these studies is the lack of longitudinal information to disentangle survival and selection effects from aging.     

Aging, source memory, and emotion

In 2 experiments we assessed younger and older adults' ability to remember contextual information about an event. Each experiment examined memory for 3 different types of contextual information: (a) perceptual information (e.g., location of an item); (b) conceptual, nonemotional information (e.g., quality of an item); and (c) conceptual, emotional information (e.g., safety of an item). Consistent with a large literature on aging and source memory, younger adults outperformed older adults when the contextual information was perceptual in nature and when it was conceptual, but not emotional. Age differences in source memory were eliminated, however, when participants recalled emotional source information. These findings suggest that emotional information differentially engages older adults, possibly evoking enhanced elaborations and associations. The data are also consistent with a growing literature, suggesting that emotional processing remains stable with age (e.g., Carstensen & Turk-Charles, 1994, 1998; Isaacowitz, Charles, & Carstensen, 2000).     

The effect of feeling stereotyped on social power and inhibition

An experience sampling study examined the degree to which feeling stereotyped predicts feelings of low power and inhibition among stigmatized and nonstigmatized individuals. For 7 days, participants with a concealable (gay and lesbian), a visible (African American), or no identifiable stigma recorded feelings of being stereotyped, of powerlessness, and of inhibition immediately following social interactions. For members of all three groups, feeling stereotyped was associated with more inhibition, and this relation was partially mediated by feeling low in power. Although stigmatized participants reported feeling stereotyped more often than nonstigmatized participants, they reacted less strongly to the experience, consistent with the presence of buffering mechanisms developed by those living with stigma. African Americans appeared to buffer the impact of feeling stereotyped more effectively than gay and lesbian participants, an effect that was partly attributable to African Americans' higher identity centrality.     

Category membership moderates the inhibition of social identities

Although all people belong to a multitude of different social categories and occupy various social roles, the mechanism(s) through which people manage such a complex and potentially incoherent self-concept is not well understood. We report a study showing that excitatory and inhibitory processes act in tandem to keep potentially conflicting self-categorizations from simultaneously occurring. Specifically, when members of the fraternity/sorority system activated their “Greek” identities, the mental representation of their normatively conflicting identity as university students was inhibited below baseline. Importantly, participants who were non-members of the Greek system, although equally familiar with the relevant stereotypes, did not show this pattern of inhibition, indicating that it is only when one experiences conflict between two relevant social categories that such inhibitory processes are engaged.     

Aging, exercise, and attention.

The authors investigated the relationship among aging, attentional processes, and exercise in 2 experiments. First they examined age differences on 2 attentional tasks, a time-sharing task and an attentional flexibility task. Young adults alternated attention between 2 sequenced tasks more rapidly and time-shared the processing of 2 tasks more efficiently than older adults. They then investigated the effects of aerobic exercise on the same 2 attentional tasks in older adults. Following the 10-week exercise program, older exercisers showed substantially more improvement in alternation speed and time-sharing efficiency than older controls. Interestingly, this exercise effect was specific to dual-task processing. Both groups of subjects showed equivalent effects on single-task performance. These results indicate that aerobic exercise can exert a beneficial influence on the efficiency of at least 2 different attentional processes in older adults.     

Differential effects of social and non‐social reward on response inhibition in children and adolescents

An important issue in the field of clinical and developmental psychopathology is whether cognitive control processes, such as response inhibition, can be specifically enhanced by motivation. To determine whether non‐social (i.e. monetary) and social (i.e. positive facial expressions) rewards are able to differentially improve response inhibition accuracy in typically developing children and adolescents, an ‘incentive’ go/no‐go task was applied with reward contingencies for successful inhibition. In addition, the impact of children's personality traits (such as reward seeking and empathy) on monetary and social reward responsiveness was assessed in 65 boys, ages 8 to 12 years. All subjects were tested twice: At baseline, inhibitory control was assessed without reward, and then subjects were pseudorandomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions, including (1) social reward only, (2) monetary reward only, (3) mixed social and monetary reward, or (4) a retest condition without reward. Both social and non‐social reward significantly improved task performance, although larger effects were observed for monetary reward. The higher the children scored on reward seeking scales, the larger was their improvement in response inhibition, but only if monetary reward was used. In addition, there was a tendency for an association between empathic skills and benefits from social reward. These data suggest that social incentives do not have an equally strong reinforcing value as compared to financial incentives. However, different personality traits seem to determine to what extent a child profits from different types of reward. Clinical implications regarding probable hyposensitivity to social reward in subjects with autism and dysregulated reward‐seeking behaviour in children with attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are discussed.