Abstract
Objectives
Intergenerational support between aging parents and adult children is important to the well-being of both groups, especially during public health emergencies. However, few ...previous studies have examined the effects of daily support between parents and children on their well-being during public health emergencies. To fill in this gap, we examined the association between daily support and well-being in mothers and their adult children during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic.
Methods
Seventy-seven pairs of mothers (aged 44–80 years, M = 53.78, SD = 9.57) and adult children (aged 18–54 years, M = 26.61, SD = 9.46; 19% male) in mainland China participated in a 14-day daily diary study during a stay-at-home period. All of the participants reported the daily emotional and instrumental support they had given to and received from their mother/child each day for 14 consecutive days. Their daily positive affect and negative affect were also measured.
Results
Receiving more support on a given day was associated with providing more support on that day, suggesting a daily reciprocity. This finding was consistent across mothers and children. A lower level of being underbenefitted on a day was associated with better daily well-being of children, but not that of mothers. Providing support, but not receiving support, was positively associated with mothers’ daily well-being, whereas receiving support, but not providing support, was positively associated with children’s daily well-being.
Discussion
This study provides evidence of daily intergenerational support during a global public health emergency. The findings shed light on the importance of daily reciprocity and its implications for well-being.
A growing body of research has documented positive outcomes of gratitude in personal and interpersonal domains. To uncover the dynamic process of gratitude and relational well-being, we examined the ...interplay of grateful disposition, grateful mood, and grateful expression in ongoing close relationships. Hong Kong Chinese couples (n = 100) participated in a three-wave study across three consecutive weeks. Adopting the Actor–Partner Interdependence Model, we found that at Time 1, grateful disposition not only predicted one’s own grateful mood but also the perceived grateful mood of one’s spouse, both of which predicted marital satisfaction. At Time 2, the couples were randomly assigned to two conditions over 2 weeks: having one spouse keeping a private gratitude journal or overtly expressing gratitude to the other. Couples’ grateful mood increased at Time 3, indicating the effectiveness of both interventions. However, the resulting changes in marital satisfaction differed for the beneficiaries (enactors) and benefactors (targets), such that husbands who perceived their wife’s expressed gratitude as less sincere declined in their marital satisfaction. The results reveal the boundary conditions in evaluating expressions of gratitude and improvement of relationships and provide implications for social exchange and couple therapy.
Aging in culture Fung, Helene H
The Gerontologist
53, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article reviews the empirical studies that test socioemotional aging across cultures. The review focuses on comparisons between Western (mostly North Americans and Germans) and Eastern cultures ...(mostly Chinese) in areas including age-related personality, social relationships, and cognition. Based on the review, I argue that aging is a meaning-making process. Individuals from each cultural context internalize cultural values with age. These internalized cultural values become goals that guide adult development. When individuals from different cultures each pursue their own goals with age, cultural differences in socioemotional aging occur.
•A deep learning based approach to model and predict human perceptions of street view images.•Mapping the human perceptions of an urban region – an empirical study in Beijing and ...Shanghai.•Quantifying the connections between visual elements and human perceptions.
Measuring the human sense of place and quantifying the connections among the visual features of the built environment that impact the human sense of place have long been of interest to a wide variety of fields. Previous studies have relied on low-throughput surveys and limited data sources, which have difficulty in measuring the human perception of a large-scale urban region at flexible spatial resolutions. In this work, a data-driven machine learning approach is proposed to measure how people perceive a place in a large-scale urban region. Specifically, a deep learning model, which has been trained on millions of human ratings of street-level imagery, was used to predict human perceptions of a street view image. The model achieved a high accuracy rate in predicting six human perceptual indicators, namely, safe, lively, beautiful, wealthy, depressing, and boring. This model can help to map the distribution of the city-wide human perception for a new urban region. Furthermore, a series of statistical analyses was conducted to determine the visual elements that may cause a place to be perceived as different perceptions. From the 150 object categories segmented from the street view images, various objects were identified as being positively or negatively correlated with each of the six perceptual indicators. The results take researchers and urban planners one step toward understanding the interactions of the place sentiments and semantics.
Objectives: Curiosity, or the desire for novel information and/or experience, is associated with improved well-being and more informed decisions, which has implications on older adults’ (OAs’) ...adoption of novel technologies. There have been suggestions that curiosity tends to decline with age. However, it was rarely studied under specific contexts, and there were relatively limited attempts to enhance OAs’ curiosity. Under the theoretical framework of selective engagement theory, we examined age differences of curiosity in the context of learning a novel technology and investigated the moderating role of personal relevance. Method: This study utilized a pretest-posttest experimental design with a total of 50 younger adults (YAs) and 50 OAs from Hong Kong to measure their trait curiosity, perceived personal relevance, and state curiosity toward robots after interacting with a robot. Results: OAs showed significantly lower trait curiosity than YAs, but OAs showed a higher level of state curiosity toward a robot than YAs when they perceived an increase in personal relevance after interacting with the robot. Conclusion: Findings replicated previous findings that trait curiosity declined with age, but they also illustrated the distinctions between trait and state curiosity in the context of aging and highlighted the potential role of personal relevance in enhancing curiosity of OAs.
Aging in culture revisited Fung, Helene H.
Current opinion in psychology,
April 2024, 2024-04-00, Volume:
56
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this article, I reviewed the literature on cross-cultural aging that was published in the last 10 years. It is intended to be an update of my prior review on aging in culture published in 2013. In ...that 2013 review, I proposed that aging processes differed across cultures when (1) individuals in the cultures concerned defined different goals as emotionally meaningful and (2) they increasingly pursued these different goals with age. Findings in the recent 10 years are generally consistent with this model, but they also suggest nuances and directions for future research.
To examine the effects of a benefit-finding intervention, the key feature being the use of gain-focused reappraisal strategies to find positive meanings and benefits in caring for someone with ...dementia.
In a cluster-randomized, double-blind, controlled trial conducted in social centers and clinics, 129 caregivers aged 18 + and without cognitive impairment, providing at least 14 care hours per week to a relative with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer disease, and scoring ≥ 3 on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale were studied. Exclusion criterion was care recipient having parkinsonism or other forms of dementia. The benefit-finding intervention was evaluated against two treatment-as-usuals, namely, simplified psychoeducation (lectures only) and standard psychoeducation. Each intervention lasted 8 weeks, with a 2-hour session per week. Randomization into these conditions was based on center/clinic membership. Primary outcome was depressive symptom. Secondary outcomes were Zarit Burden Interview, role overload, and psychological well-being. Self-efficacy beliefs and positive gains were treated as mediators. Measures were collected at baseline and post-treatment.
Regression analyses showed benefit-finding treatment effects on all outcomes when compared with simplified psychoeducation and effects on depressive symptoms and Zarit burden when compared with standard psychoeducation. Effect sizes were medium-to-large for depressive symptoms (d = -0.77 to -0.96) and medium for secondary outcomes (d = |0.42-0.65|). Furthermore, using the bootstrapping method, we found significant mediating effects by self-efficacy in controlling upsetting thoughts and positive gains, with the former being the primary mediator.
Finding positive gains reduces depressive symptoms and burden and promotespsychological well-being primarily through enhancing self-efficacy in controlling upsetting thoughts.
The age-related positivity effect might be driven by age differences in seeking emotional positivity or the meaning attached to positive information. To examine these 2 hypotheses, we recruited young ...and older Mainland Chinese adults to complete a recognition memory task, in which they viewed and recognized a series of pictures varying in emotional valence (neutral, positive, or negative) and cultural relevance (relevant to Chinese or Western culture). Participants were instructed to just view the pictures (Experiment 1), to focus on the emotional valence of the pictures (Experiment 2a), to focus on the cultural relevance of the pictures (Experiment 2b), or to focus on both (Experiment 2c). Because cultural relevance could alter the meaning of a picture without changing its emotional valence, the age-related positivity effect should not be moderated by cultural relevance if the effect is driven by age differences in seeking emotional positivity. In contrast, such a moderation effect should be detected if the age-related positivity effect is driven by age differences in seeking meaning. The results of Experiment 2b supported the latter speculation by finding an age-related positivity effect for Chinese pictures but not for Western pictures, although the other 3 experiments found an age-related positivity effect that was not moderated by cultural relevance. These results show that the motivation to seek meaning plays a role in the age-related positivity effect at least in certain situations. The cross-experiment divergencies of the results are discussed.
Although extensive findings underscore the relevance of future time perspective (FTP) in the process of aging, the assumption of FTP as a unifactorial construct has been challenged. The present study ...explores the factorial structure of the FTP scale (Carstensen & Lang, 1996) as one of the most widely used measures (Ntotal = 2,170). Results support that FTP reflects a higher-order construct that consists of 3 interrelated components-Opportunity, Extension, and Constraint. It is suggested that the flexible usage of the FTP scale as an all compassing 10-item measure or with focus on specific components depends on the concrete research question.
Abstract
Objectives
Whether older adults are more prosocial than younger adults has been under debate. In the current study, we investigated how age differences in prosocial behaviors varied across ...different contextual factors, that is, donation form, kinship, and social distance.
Methods
To achieve this purpose, 89 younger and 66 older adults took part in a hypothetical donation task in which they were asked to donate money and time to relatives and nonrelatives at various social distances.
Results
The results showed that, compared to younger adults, (a) older adults donated less to nonrelatives (regardless of the donation form), but donated a similar amount (in money) or even donated more (in time) to relatives; (b) older adults displayed higher levels of kin selection (favoring relatives over nonrelatives) in both monetary and time donations; and (c) older adults showed higher levels of social discounting (favoring socially close over distant others) in monetary but not time donation.
Discussion
The study underscored the importance of contextual factors in understanding age differences in prosocial behaviors such as donation.
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