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Research is presented on self-concept differentiation (SCD) for subjects between 20 and 88 years of age. Studies indicate that SCD is significantly associated with psychological well-being and emotional adjustment, but associated with age only under specific measures.

A series of tests was conducted for studying the acquisition of cognitive skills and the effects of age on this process. Benefits of repetition were attributed to retrieval of instances and algorithmic speedup, while response-time speed improvements were attributed to item retrieval.

Cognition tests were performed by three different age groups, 20-39 years of age, 40-59 years, and 60-75 years, involving simulated real-world search and retrieval tasks. Age differences were significant for all task performance measures except for navigational efficiency and number of correctly navigated problems per attempt; task experience was also a factor in performance.

Research is presented on both healthy individuals and individuals with dementia to map declines in linguistic ability, specifically for propositional content and grammatical complexity. Declines in the healthy group were linked to advancing age, while declines in the dementia group were evident regardless of age. However, rates of decline were found to be uniform across individuals.

A study of younger, middle-aged, and older twins using the univariate and multivariate genetic studies failed to show any differences in the heritability of memory efficacy across cohorts while differences were observed at the level of particular memory measures. Memory data from the Minnesota Twin Study of Adult Development and Aging was used in the study.

Analysis of the performance of young and old adults in language processing tests, measures of working memory, inhibitory efficiency and processing ability shows that age differences in processing speed and inhibitory efficiency mediated variations in language performance. In addition, controlling the speed and inhibition differences led to unreliability in evaluating language performance. Each measure substantially predicted language performance and its attenuated variance.

Analysis of the effect of distraction on reading abilities of younger and older adults in three experiments with stable and unpredictable distractors revealed marked effects of unpredictable distraction in older adults compared to younger adults, which were reduced significantly as the location of distraction was fixed. The vulnerability of older adults to distraction through the relatedness effect was removed by fixed distractions.

A study of age differences in direct and indirect cued recall tests for the retrieval of implicit information in young and old adults revealed age differences due to the impact of target and cue set size and due to the type of test instruction. Compared to the second test, targets in the first test were significantly related to their cues. The direct test provided cues to enable the retrieval of the studied word, whereas the indirect test dealt with related words.

The role played by health and BioAge on age and sex differences in cognitive performance was examined in a cross-sectional sample of adults ranging from 61 to 95 years. People with relatively better health had pronounced negative effects of age, and sex differences were moderated by health and were more pronounced among people with poorer health.

A study looked at age in association with increases in interindividual variability in ability domains from a sample of elderly community dwellers. Hierarchical regression analyses suggested that being female, with weaker muscle strength and greater symptoms of illness and depression were linked with overall greater variability in cognitive scores. Having a higher level of education was linked with reduced variability.

Close ties with friends and family are important in adults' lives, but the implications of infrequent or peripheral social ties maintained by adults are not well known. Marketing research shows that adults of all ages buy greeting cards, and some adults write notes, newsletters or personalized cards. The holiday card forum was examined to understand the ways relationships are maintained through holiday greetings, how recipients react to the holiday cards and whether holiday card ties contribute to the social well being of adults. Younger adults saw their holiday greetings as a way of maintaining or building new social links, while older adults saw their holiday greetings as a link to their past.