Objectives: Information and communicative technology (ICT) use is a potential vehicle for improving the psychological well-being (PWB) of older people. We examined the roles of age, frailty, and ...social connectedness in the relationship between ICT use and PWB.
Method: Telephone interviews were conducted in mid-2016 with 1201 participants aged 50 and above (55.7% female) residing in Hong Kong, China. The participants reported PWB, ICT use (frequency of using the Internet and smart devices), frailty status, contact with family, friends, and neighbors, self-rated health, subjective financial sufficiency, education level, and employment status.
Results: We found that the association between ICT and PWB was moderated by age: ICT was associated with PWB only among old-olds (75+), but not in other age groups. This moderation was mediated by contact with family, but not with friends or neighbors. The moderation was further qualified by frailty status: the ICT-by-age moderation was found only among frail, but not pre-frail or robust older adults.
Conclusion: The findings suggest that ICT use can potentially enhance the PWB of older adults aged 75+ through facilitating their contact with family members. These benefits might be particularly salient for those who were frail. Improving ICT access and literacy among older adults may be promising.
Older adults report higher marital satisfaction than younger adults even after negative interactions. The current study examined affect valuation as a potential moderator to explain age-related ...differences in the relationship between negative interactions and marital satisfaction. We conducted a 14-day daily diary study among 66 heterosexual couples (132 participants) aged from 21 to 80 years. At both person and daily levels, we found that valuing negative affect weakened the negative association between negative interactions and marital satisfaction in husbands. The moderating effect of negative affect valuation was stronger in older than younger husbands at the person but not daily level. Valuing positive affect more was associated with a stronger negative association between negative interactions and marital satisfaction in husbands at the person but not daily level. Such effect was again stronger in older than younger husbands. No significant results were found in wives. These findings shed light on the importance of affect valuation in understanding age-related differences in marital dynamics.
Abstract
Objectives
Optimistic bias refers to the phenomenon that individuals believe bad things are less likely to happen to themselves than to others. However, whether optimistic bias could vary ...across age and culture is unknown. The present study aims to investigate (a) whether individuals exhibit optimistic bias in the context of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and (b) whether age and culture would moderate such bias.
Method
1,051 participants recruited from China, Israel, and the United States took the online survey. Risk perceptions consist of 3 questions: estimating the infected probability of different social distance groups (i.e., self, close others, and nonclose others), the days that it would take for the number of new infections to decrease to zero and the trend of infections in regions of different geographical distances (i.e., local place, other places inside participants’ country, and other countries). Participants in China and the United States also reported their personal communal values measured by Schwartz’s Value Survey.
Results
Results from Hierarchical Linear Modeling generally confirmed that (a) all participants exhibited optimistic bias to some extent, and (b) with age, Chinese participants had a higher level of optimistic bias than the Israeli and U.S. participants. Compared to their younger counterparts, older Chinese are more likely to believe that local communities are at lower risk of COVID-19 than other countries.
Discussion
These findings support the hypothesis that age differences in risk perceptions might be influenced by cultural context. Further analysis indicated that such cultural and age variations in optimistic bias were likely to be driven by age-related increase in internalized cultural values.
Abstract
Objectives
Previous literature has consistently shown a positive association between negative self-perception of aging and mortality in middle-aged and older adults. However, two questions ...remain unsolved: (a) whether such association holds among very old people (i.e., the fourth age) and (b) the potential mediators that could contribute to the positive association. This study sought to fill in the research gap by examining the association between self-perception of aging and mortality in a group of very old Chinese participants (i.e., aged over 78 years).
Methods
Four waves of data across a span of 8 years (2000–2008) were obtained from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey, which measured a total of 9,683 participants’ negative self-perception of aging, survival status, cognitive functioning, diet, as well as other demographic information.
Results
Latent growth models with survival analysis were conducted, and the results replicated previous findings indicating an association between negative self-perceptions of aging and reduced survival. Moreover and more importantly, a potential mediator—healthy lifestyle (e.g., eating fresh vegetables and fruits, exercising regularly, and no smoking)—was identified, such that older adults with more negative self-perception of aging tended to engage in less healthy lifestyle, which could lead to increased risk of mortality.
Discussion
The findings provided support for a longitudinal behavioral pathway of health, linking negative perceptions of aging to mortality, and also yielded important practical implications for older adults to reach longevity.
Abstract
Objectives
Preparation for age-related changes has been shown to be beneficial to adjustment in later life. However, an understanding of the factors that influence such preparations is ...rather limited. This study examines whether perceived control and future-self views (FSV) influence preparations for old age, and if this influence varies across ages, domains of functioning, and cultures.
Methods
Assessments of perceived control, FSV, and preparations for old age in each of four different life domains (social relationships, finances, work, and health) were obtained from 1,813 adults (ages 35–85) from Germany, Hong Kong, and the United States.
Results
Future-self views partially mediated the relationship between perceived control and preparation for old age across both domains of functioning and cultures. With one exception, the association between perceived control and preparations increased with advancing age across contexts. Evidence for similar age-related moderation of the indirect effect of control through FSV was more limited.
Discussion
These results suggest that perceived control that is not necessarily related to aging affect FSV, which in turn influence preparing for old age. Further, our results indicate that such relationships are context- and age-specific, highlighting the importance of considering the salience and diversity of life domains and cultures.
In gambling contexts, near-misses tend to be perceived as more aversive yet elicit greater motivation to continue playing than clear losses. The current research aimed to examine these effects in the ...context of situational and dispositional social power. In a pre-registered online study, Hong Kong Chinese undergraduate students (
N
= 238) with varying levels of gambling involvement completed a measure assessing their general beliefs about their ability to influence others and were then randomly assigned to imagine themselves in a position of high or low power. Participants subsequently played a computerized scratchcard task that delivered wins, near-misses, and clear losses and took trial-by-trial ratings of valence, arousal, and motivation. Following a mandatory phase, persistence was measured via the number of additional scratchcards participants chose to purchase. The results generally corroborated previous findings of different subjective appraisals to near-misses vs. clear losses, but surprisingly found that near-misses were considered to be more pleasant than clear losses. Situational power did not differentially modify these responses. Nevertheless, a main effect of dispositional power emerged in that participants who felt chronically high in power were twice as likely to purchase additional scratchcards compared to their low dispositional power counterparts. This study suggests that a generalized sense of power but not situational power triggers approach motivation in the form of prolonged gambling play.
How perspective-taking ability changes with age (i.e., whether older adults are better at understanding others' behaviors and intentions and show greater empathy to others or not) is not clear, with ...prior empirical findings on this phenomenon yielding mixed results. In a series of experiments, we investigated the phenomenon from a motivational perspective. Perceived closeness between participants and the experimenter (Study 1) or the target in an emotion recognition task (Study 2) was manipulated to examine whether the closeness could influence participants' performance in faux pas recognition (Study 1) and emotion recognition (Study 2). It was found that the well-documented negative age effect (i.e., older adults performed worse than younger adults in faux pas and emotion recognition tasks) was only replicated in the control condition for both tasks. When closeness was experimentally increased, older adults enhanced their performance, and they now performed at a comparable level as younger adults. Findings from the 2 experiments suggest that the reported poorer performance of older adults in perspective-taking tasks might be attributable to a lack of motivation instead of ability to perform in laboratory settings. With the presence of strong motivation, older adults have the ability to perform equally well as younger adults.
Older adults might be less information-seeking in comparison to younger adults. Yet, when a crisis hits, rather than relying on only a few information sources, it is important for people to gather ...information from a variety of different sources. With more information sources, people are more likely to obtain a more realistic perception of the situation and engagement of health behaviors. This study examined the association between age and information-seeking patterns, and how information-seeking patterns influenced worry about coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and protective measures taken during the pandemic.
This study was conducted from March to May 2020. Ninety younger adults and 105 older adults were recruited in a 21-day daily diary study. Participants reported the types of sources where they received COVID-19-related information, worry from these information sources and protective health behaviors performed each day. Multilevel serial mediation analysis was performed.
Concurrent and time-lagged analyses both revealed that older adults received information from more sources, and more frequently from traditional (e.g., newspaper and TV) and interpersonal sources (e.g., information shared by friends and families), than did younger adults. When receiving information from more sources, older adults were more worried about COVID-19 and performed more protective health behaviors.
These results demonstrated the utility of having more information sources in the context of a public health crisis and offered suggestions for future public communication and community engagement.
Studies on socioemotional selectivity theory have found that compared with younger adults, older adults are more likely to (a) prefer to interact with emotionally close social partners and (b) show ...preferential cognitive processing of positive relative to negative stimuli. To integrate these 2 lines of findings, this study examined attention toward emotional (positive and negative) facial expressions of experimentally manipulated emotionally close versus nonclose targets among younger and older adults. Compared with younger adults, older adults gazed more at facial expressions of emotionally close than nonclose targets, regardless of valence. This age difference occurred to a greater extent among those who endorsed eudaimonic goals more.
With global aging, robots are considered a promising solution for handling the shortage of aged care and companionships. However, these technologies would serve little purpose if their intended users ...do not accept them. While the socioemotional selectivity theory predicts that older adults would accept robots that offer emotionally meaningful relationships, selective optimization with compensation model predicts that older adults would accept robots that compensate for their functional losses.
The present study aims to understand older adults' expectations for robots and to compare older adults' acceptance ratings for 2 existing robots: one of them is a more human-like and more service-oriented robot and the other one is a more animal-like and more companion-oriented robot.
A mixed methods study was conducted with 33 healthy, community-dwelling Taiwanese older adults (age range: 59-82 years). Participants first completed a semi-structured interview regarding their ideal robot. After receiving information about the 2 existing robots, they then completed the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology questionnaires to report their pre-implementation acceptance of the 2 robots.
Interviews were transcribed for conventional content analysis with satisfactory inter-rater reliability. From the interview data, a collection of older adults' ideal robot characteristics emerged with highlights of humanlike qualities. From the questionnaire data, respondents showed a higher level of acceptance toward the more service-oriented robot than the more companion-oriented robot in terms of attitude, perceived adaptiveness, and perceived usefulness. From the mixed methods analyses, the finding that older adults had a higher level of positive attitude towards the more service-oriented robot than the more companion-oriented robot was predicted by higher expectation or preference for robots with more service-related functions.
This study identified older adults' preference toward more functional and humanlike robots. Our findings provide practical suggestions for future robot designs that target the older population.
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