Research on consequences of adversity appears inconclusive. Adversity can be detriment to mental health, promoting maladaptive patterns of thoughts. At the same time, posttraumatic growth studies ...suggest that overcoming major adversity facilitates growth in wisdom-related patterns of thoughts. We address this puzzle by examining how distinct types of adversity impact wisdom over time and how individual differences in self-distanced (rather than self-immersed) reflection on adversity relate to different wisdom trajectories. In a four-wave prospective year-long study, participants (N = 499) recalled and reflected every three months on the most significant recent adverse event in their life. They reported how much they engaged in wise reasoning—intellectual humility, open-mindedness to diverse perspectives and change, search for compromises and resolution—as well as self-distancing during reflections. Independent raters identified seven distinct adversity types (e.g. social conflict, economic hardship, major trauma) in open-ended descriptions. Growth curve analyses revealed little evidence of positive change in wise-reasoning over the course of a year, and some evidence of negative change for health-related adversity. Although self-distancing was associated with stability in wisdom, self-immersing was associated with negative change in wisdom in reflections on social conflicts over time. We discuss implications these results have for adversity, change vs. resilience in character strengths, and self-distancing.
Is 50 considered "old"? When do we stop being considered "young"? If individuals could choose to be any age, what would it be? In a sample of 502,548 internet respondents ranging in age from 10 to ...89, we examined age differences in aging perceptions (e.g., how old do you feel?) and estimates of the timing of developmental transitions (e.g., when does someone become an older adult?). We found that older adults reported older perceptions of aging (e.g., choosing to be older, feeling older, being perceived as older), but that these perceptions were increasingly younger than their current age. The age to which individuals hope to live dramatically increased after age 40. We also found that older adults placed the age at which developmental transitions occurred later in the life course. This latter effect was stronger for transitions involving middle-age and older adulthood compared to transitions involving young adulthood. The current study constitutes the largest study to date of age differences in age perceptions and developmental timing estimates and yielded novel insights into how the aging process may affect judgments about the self and others.
•Life is full of experiences that can change how individuals develop.•Developmental time and developmental space are inextricably linked.•I review mechanisms of geographic and lifespan variability in ...psychological traits.•I present axioms about how individual development is rooted within space and time.
One of the main initiatives in the study of psychological development is to examine how individuals change across the lifespan and in response to important life events. Indeed, life is full of transformative experiences that can change how individuals develop and how happy and healthy they are. To date, much of the work on adult development has been decontextualized with respect to these issues—despite developmental time and developmental space being inextricably linked. Here, I review the mechanisms that give rise to geographic and lifespan variability in psychological traits and present a series of axioms about how individual development is rooted within space and time. The axioms focus on how individuals live within a particular space-time (and the consequences of this), the controllability of development and geographic mobility, that places are defined by our interpretation of them within time, and that places—just like individuals—are not static entities over time. Individuals and their environments interact in complicated ways over time and gaining a broader understanding of these interactions can provide us with a more holistic perspective on psychological development.
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Data from Project Implicit were analyzed to explore trends in ableism. Over 300,000 U.S. residents with and without disabilities completed the Disability Implicit Association Test and two measures of ...explicit prejudice. The most consistent predictors of bias across types of prejudice were gender and contact with individuals with disabilities: Women and those who had contact were less prejudiced. Temporal analyses indicated that mean implicit prejudice increased over time (2004–2017), yet explicit bias showed a decline over the same period. Among people with disabilities, implicit and explicit prejudice were related to lower contact with others who shared one's disability, as well as to perceptions that one's disorder affects few activities and/or is primarily mental or emotional. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Coworker support has been hypothesized to enhance work-life outcomes. However, the mechanisms underlying this association are unclear. Two studies examined how coworker support predicted work-life ...outcomes through positive work environment and burnout. It was hypothesized that coworker support enhances work environment, and that better work environment is associated with less burnout; in turn, reduced burnout is associated with less negative work-life interference. In two large studies of working adults (total
= 5,666), we found support for our model - coworker support predicted work-family outcomes and this association was mediated by more positive work environments and reduced burnout. Study 2 was a short-term lagged confirmation of the model. Results are discussed in the context of efforts to improve workplace climate, reduce turnover, and improve workers' job satisfaction.
•We examined actor, partner, and similarity effects of personality on well-being.•Actor C, A, E, and N were the most robust predictors of individual well-being.•Partner C and N were the most robust ...predictors of individual well-being.•Results are discussed in the context of experiential well-being and similarity.
The current study examined actor, partner, and similarity effects of personality on a variety of well-being indices, including both global and experiential measures of well-being, in 2578 heterosexual couples (N = 5156 individuals; Mage = 51.04, SD = 13.68) who completed the 2016 Wellbeing and Daily Life supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Among actor effects, those for conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism were the most robust predictors of well-being. Among partner effects, conscientiousness and neuroticism were the most robust predictors of well-being. Consistent with past research, similarity effects on well-being were generally small and not always significant. The results are discussed in the context of experiential conceptualizations of well-being and operationalizing similarity in relationship research.
Objective
Higher optimism has been linked with health, well‐being, and cognitive functioning. Spouses also play an important role on people's health, especially in older adulthood. Yet, whether a ...spouse's optimism is associated with an individual's cognitive functioning is understudied. Thus, we examined this question.
Method
Participants were 4,457 heterosexual couples (N = 8,914; Mage = 66.73, SD = 9.67) from the Health and Retirement Study—a large, diverse, prospective, and nationally representative sample of U.S. adults aged >50. Optimism was assessed at baseline (t1) and cognition was measured every two years with up to five repeated assessments of cognition data over the 8‐year follow‐up period (t1; t2; t3; t4; t5).
Results
Results from multi‐level dyadic data analyses showed small but positive associations between actor optimism and actor cognitive functioning (memory: r = .16, mental status = .10), as well as partner optimism and actor cognitive functioning (memory: r = .04, mental status = .03). These associations mostly persisted over time.
Conclusions
Participants' own optimism and their partner's optimism were both positively associated with cognitive functioning.Thus, with further research, optimism (at both the individual and couple level) might emerge as an innovative intervention target that helps adults maintain cognitive functioning as they age.
In many families, multiple caregivers support older adults living with dementia. Studying collaboration among caregivers requires consideration of conceptual and methodological issues that have not ...been fully explored. This study presents a framework for conceptualizing caregiver collaboration and an index that captures variation in collaboration among multiple caregivers within care networks.
We used data from the 2015 waves of the National Health and Aging Trends Study and National Study of Caregiving (NSOC) to operationalize collaboration among multiple caregivers (N = 1,298) of 552 care recipients (Mage = 83.69, SD = 7.73; 71.6% women; 47.9% possible/probable dementia; 38.9% people of color).
The care collaboration index considered individual and overlapping contributions while controlling for the size of the care network (caregivers in network responding to NSOC survey) and total network size (number of caregivers in network) in the statistical model. Larger care networks enabled more collaboration, both in general and across most types of tasks (βs > 0.38). Collaboration was greater among those caring for a Black or Hispanic care recipient, both in general and for household and medical/health tasks specifically (βs > 0.11). Collaboration was also greater among those caring for recipients with probable dementia, both in general and for most tasks (βs > 0.11) but not transportation-related tasks (p = .219).
Results are examined in the context of care network dynamics and proposed mechanisms linking care collaboration to outcomes for caregivers and recipients. Strengths and limitations of our conceptualization and operationalization of collaboration are discussed.
The current study aimed to conceptually replicate previous studies on the effects of actor personality, partner personality, and personality similarity on general and relational well-being by using ...response surface analyses and a longitudinal sample of 4,464 romantic couples. Similar to previous studies using difference scores and profile correlations, results from response surface analyses indicated that personality similarity explained a small amount of variance in well-being as compared with the amount of variance explained by linear actor and partner effects. However, response surface analyses also revealed that second-order terms (i.e., the interaction term and quadratic terms of actor and partner personality) were systematically linked to couples' well-being for all traits except neuroticism. In particular, most response surfaces showed a complex pattern in which the effect of similarity and dissimilarity on well-being depended on the level and combination of actor and partner personality. In addition, one small but robust similarity effect was found, indicating that similarity in agreeableness was related to women's experience of support across the eight years of the study. The discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for theory and research on personality similarity in romantic relationships.
The current study examined how changes in marital quality are associated with changes in sleep quality in older adults over an 8-year period. Older adults from the Health and Retirement Study ...completed measures of both marital support/strain and sleep quality in 2006, 2010, and 2014 (N = 4981). We used latent growth curve models to examine intraindividual change in support, strain, and sleep quality. Further, we examined interrelationships between changes in each of these three indicators. Results showed that higher marital quality was associated with better sleep at baseline. We also found that marital quality and sleep quality were coordinated over time—as marital quality increased, so did sleep quality. When this covariation was accounted, the prospective effects of baseline marital quality on changes in sleep quality were not found. The current study provided evidence for a long-term temporal coordination of marital quality and sleep quality in older adults.
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