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...

Abstract This article studies earnings inequality between social classes across 30 European countries. Class in is found the board although there are some exceptions. However, degree of class varies strongly countries being larger Western and Southern smaller Eastern Northern Furthermore, we find that differences composition terms observed characteristics associated with account for a substanti...

The reasons why previous studies of fear of crime yield different conclusions regarding age differences are examined. Data from a national survey of adults are used to assess whether older adults manifest the highest levels of fear of crime. No significant relationship was found between age and the commonly used indicators of fear of crime in many previous studies when controlling for relevant ...

This article examines age differences in positive, but especially negative, interactions in close relationships. Two community-based representative samples of people from 13 to 96 years of age from the United States and Japan were used to explore these relationships. Analyses indicate stability across age in positive interactions but a general decline in negative interactions in both countries....