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Research has long shown that men suffer more from romantic breakups than women. We predicted that men would on average be less inclined to initiate separation, decline with the separation more in well-being and increase more in loneliness, are less satisfied with singlehood, and desire a new partner more than women. We theorized that these gender differences in separation adaptation could be linked to men’s higher reliance on their partners for emotional support. Because socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that with age people shift toward more fulfilling social connections, we also expected men’s dependency on their partners for emotional support to be smaller in midlife than in young adulthood. To examine our hypotheses, we analyzed multiyear within-person longitudinal change data from 1,530 mostly unmarried participants from the annual German pairfam study who had experienced a relationship dissolution. We applied propensity score matching to compare separation-related changes in well-being and loneliness to case-matched controls who remained in a romantic relationship. Results showed that men relative to women were less likely to initiate separation, less satisfied with singlehood, and wished for a partner more. In contrast to our expectations, the gender differences observed did not differ by age, and no gender differences were found in separation-related changes in well-being and loneliness. Dissolution-related effects on well-being were only evident for marital relationships, while dissolution-related effects on loneliness were equally strong for marital and nonmarital dissolutions. Our study suggests that previous findings on gender-specific divorce-induced changes in well-being may not generalize to nonmarital dissolutions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
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The study of whether temporal processing in the millisecond-to-seconds range changes with age is an active and debated research field. Here, we adopted a lifespan approach in which younger to older participants performed both explicit and implicit timing tasks (time bisection and foreperiod tasks, respectively) in a single session. Three hundred seven participants (age range: 20–85 years) took part in the study. Participants performed two timing tasks to test explicit and implicit time processing. Age was used as a continuous predictor to elucidate whether explicit and implicit temporal processing change with increasing age. The results from the explicit timing task showed reduced precision with age, as indexed by a flatter psychometric curve and greater just noticeable difference metrics. By contrast, implicit processing of time was not significantly affected by age, as evinced by a comparable foreperiod effect across age. These findings provide first adult lifespan evidence that only explicit, but not implicit, timing is sensitive to age-related changes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
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Negative views of aging (VoA) present a motivational barrier to healthy aging. Although prior interventions have demonstrated success in making adults’ negative VoA more positive, reliance on self-report-based explicit measures is insufficient to examine whether these interventions also affected individuals’ implicit VoA. Thus, this study assessed the impact of the AgingPLUS program, a 4-week psychoeducational intervention, on implicit measures of VoA in a randomized controlled trial. Participants aged 45–75 years (Mage = 60.1 years, SDage = 8.3) were randomized to either the AgingPLUS program (n = 162) or a health education control group (n = 173). Implicit VoA were assessed using two computer-administered tasks: the Implicit Association Test and a lexical decision-making task. Data on implicit VoA were collected at baseline and two follow-up assessments over a 32-week period and analyzed using linear mixed-effects models. The results showed limited evidence of temporal changes or group differences regarding implicit VoA. However, participants with more positive baseline implicit VoA demonstrated greater improvements in explicit VoA, particularly in their awareness of age-related gains. Overall, explicit intervention approaches, such as the AgingPLUS program, can lead to substantial improvements in adults’ self-reported VoA, although their effect on implicit VoA remains unclear. The findings underscore the importance of future interventions to (a) evaluate both explicit and implicit VoA and (b) tailor intervention designs to specific outcomes to achieve sustained, long-term positive changes in negative VoA. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
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Age-related changes in cognitive and biological processes mean that older adults show markedly lower performance on cognitive assessments than younger adults. Characterizing the precise nature of age-related differences in cognitive performance and whether they vary as a function of key demographic characteristics has been challenging due to small effect sizes, underpowered samples, and blunt analysis methods. In the present study, we address these issues by using a massive cross-sectional data set of approximately 750,000 English-speaking participants who completed at least one battery from the NeuroCognitive Performance Test. We employ stacked ensembles, a machine learning approach, to model differences in age-related cognitive performance from 25 to 80 years based on gender and education. We utilize bootstrapping to quantify uncertainties and compare predicted performances across age, gender, education, and subtest while accounting for data variability. We then use clustering techniques to identify cognitive subtests with similar patterns across demographics. Our novel approach reveals several notable trends. For example, tasks reliant on semantic knowledge and fluid reasoning, such as completing patterns or arithmetic word problems, exhibit similar education-dependent variation. On tasks where men outperform women at early ages, men’s predicted performance also shows greater decline across the age range, resulting in a narrower or nonexistent gender gap at older ages. We discuss additional age, gender, and education interactions, as well as variations in the magnitude and onset age of change in the predicted slope of performance, most of which appear dependent on the specific cognitive area being evaluated. Implications for theories of aging are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
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Recently, a distinction has been drawn between conventional false memories, which misrepresent specific facts, and deep distortions, which misrepresent relations that connect facts. We report the first study of adult developmental trends in deep distortions, using a paradigm in which people make conjoint recognition judgments about incompatible facts (e.g., Was Einstein born in Austria, Germany, or Switzerland?). As conventional false memories increase over the adult lifespan, it is natural to expect that deep distortions will do likewise. Surprisingly, however, the modal explanation of adult increases in false memory predicts that deep distortions will be developmentally invariant. We tested that prediction in two experiments that measured three deep distortions (violations of the logical laws of additivity, countable additivity, and universal event) in memory for real-world incompatibility relations (e.g., size of planets, geographical location of companies, people in historical events). In Experiment 1, robust violations of all three laws were detected in younger adults (N = 105; Mage = 20), and as predicted, those violations did not increase in adults (N = 182; Mage = 33) or older adults (N = 176; Mage = 62). Experiment 2 was designed to test whether deep distortions would increase with age when there was stronger support for retrieving verbatim memories, but once again, deep distortion levels were the same in young adults (N = 81; Mage = 19), adults (N = 167; Mage = 34), and older adults (N = 170; Mage = 62). Conjoint recognition analyses revealed that throughout the adult lifespan, verbatim memory played no role in deep distortions. Other analyses revealed that although incompatible facts are perfectly compensatory in the real world (Einstein could only be born in Germany to the extent that he was not born in Austria or Switzerland), memory for incompatible facts is noncompensatory throughout the adult lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
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According to the Flynn effect, performance on cognitive ability tests has improved over the past decades. However, we know very little about whether such historical improvements generalize to middle-aged adults (aged 45–65) and differ across nations. We used harmonized data on episodic memory from nationally representative longitudinal panel surveys across a total of 16 countries (United States, Mexico, China, England, and countries in Continental, Mediterranean, and Nordic Europe). We compared historical change in age-related trajectories of episodic memory among middle-aged adults. Our sample included 117,231 participants who provided 330,390 observations. Longitudinal multilevel regression models revealed that today’s middle-aged adults in the United States perform worse on episodic memory tests than their peers in the past. By contrast, today’s middle-aged adults in most other countries perform better on these tests than their peers in the past. However, later-born cohorts of U.S. and Chinese middle-aged adults experienced less steep within-person decrements—or even increments—in episodic memory than earlier born cohorts. Historical change trends persisted when controlling for sociodemographic factors, as well as for indicators of physical and mental health. Differences in episodic memory by gender and education became smaller over historical time across all nations. Our findings suggest that countries differ considerably in episodic memory performance, by more than half a standard deviation, and in the direction and size of how midlife episodic memory trajectories have changed over historical time. Further factors related to historical changes in midlife episodic memory need to be identified by future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
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We analyzed the data of a randomized controlled trial to examine the effects of piano practice on cognitive flexibility in healthy older adults. Participants (N = 153, 69.5 ± 3.5 years of age, 57.5% females) were randomly assigned to a piano practice group (PP) or a control group engaged in active music listening (MC). Both groups underwent a year-long intervention with weekly 60-min lessons and daily homework. We assessed switch and mixing costs in terms of speed (mean reaction times) and variability (standard deviation of reaction times) with a number switch and a perceptual switch task. We employed scale analysis based on musical instrument digital interface to assess pianistic performance. Tests were conducted at baseline, after 6 months, postintervention (12 months), and at follow-up (18 months). Results revealed more pronounced improvements in pianistic performance in the PP group compared with the MC group over the course of the intervention. Both groups exhibited gains in several cognitive flexibility outcomes, which originated primarily in the latter half of the intervention. For mixing costs of the number switch test, the PP group showed greater improvements compared with the MC group. Changes in pianistic performance were not related to changes in cognitive flexibility. Additionally, the findings indicated a compensation account in both groups, which was more pronounced in the PP group for mixing costs. This study suggests that both piano practice and active music listening—with piano practice to a higher degree—enhance cognitive flexibility, particularly in sustained control mechanisms linked to mixing costs. Both interventions potentially require longer than 6 months to induce behavioral transfer effects and are especially beneficial for individuals with lower cognitive flexibility levels. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
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Thu, 17 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT