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While prior research has shown a relationship between age diversity and outcomes in teams, little knowledge exists regarding the theoretical mechanisms driving these outcomes. Furthermore, mixed findings from prior research indicate that these relationships differ depending upon contextual factors. Our field study tests two potential mediators and one possible moderator of the relationship between age diversity and team performance. Multi-source data collected from 71 Chinese township government leadership groups showed that team age diversity is positively associated with survey measures of two emergent states, specifically, perceived team effectiveness and collective team identification, which in turn positively predict an objective measure of team performance. The fully mediated model was moderated by leader moral identity, which strengthened the relationships between age diversity and both team emergent states. Results also showed a curvilinear relationship between age diversity and the two team emergent states which was not significantly moderated by leader moral identity. These findings contribute to extant knowledge from an integrative approach within a non-Western cultural context. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed., Author(s): Xinhui Wu [sup.1] , Alison M. Konrad [sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.411526.5, 0000 0001 0024 2884, Department of Administration, School of Political Science and Public Administration, China University of [...]

A new concept of empathy was adopted in this study to elucidate the relationship between empathy and age and eight catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene polymorphisms. One hundred and eighty-two participants were genotyped on eight COMT loci. The Interpersonal Reactivity Index and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test (RMET) measured the participants' empathy. Group comparison, correlation, and regression analyses were conducted. After adjusting [alpha] by the Bonferroni method (p = .00125), there was no difference in any empathy index on 8 COMT variants. Still, middle-aged with the AA allele at rs165599 and rs165655 had higher personal distress than those with the GA allele after controlling for the sex variable. The rs6267 with more G allele could predict higher cognitive empathy ([beta] = .222, p = .003). After controlling for education, the RMET performance of older adults was worse than that of younger adults (p < .01). Moreover, being female predicted higher personal distress ([beta] = -.239, p = .001) and affective empathy ([beta] = -.247, p = .001), and higher education level predicted better results in RMET ([beta] = .344, p < .001). People with various genotypes in specific age groups showed significant differences in particular empathy indicators. Age and education can shape an individual's empathy together with innate factors., Author(s): Jing-Hao Hsu [sup.1] , Chun-Hsiang Tan [sup.2] [sup.3] , Rwei-Ling Yu [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.64523.36, 0000 0004 0532 3255, Institute of Behavioral Medicine, College of Medicine, National Cheng [...]

The downward extension of psychopathic traits to childhood and adolescence proved to be important in both research and clinical practice. The current study investigates how distinct psychopathic traits (i.e., callous-unemotional traits, narcissism, impulsivity) contribute to the prediction of conduct disorder (CD) symptoms, and whether these associations vary as a function of age. Further, we aimed to examine the variability in mean levels of psychopathic traits from age 9 to age 20 in a large community sample (N = 9136) using cross-sectional analysis. The study's findings provided evidence for age variability in psychopathic traits, since narcissism was found to be more prevalent from age 13-15, impulsivity from age 13 to 20, and CU traits from age 15-18. These findings demonstrate that psychopathic traits are less prevalent during childhood than adolescence. Further, the pattern of association between CD symptoms and psychopathic traits also displayed variability by age. Specifically, even though the overall regression of psychopathic traits on CD symptoms suggested that the three psychopathic dimensions had comparable impact on CD, the separate regressions by age group suggested that impulsivity was the strongest predictor of CD in childhood and early adolescence (ages 9-14), while narcissism was the strongest predictor of CD in mid-adolescence (ages 15-17). In contrast, callous-unemotional traits had a more stable effect on CD symptoms across time. Current evidence can inform existing attempts for the developmental extension of the construct of psychopathy to childhood and adolescence., Author(s): Kostas A. Fanti [sup.1] , Alexandros Lordos [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.6603.3, 0000000121167908, Department of Psychology, University of Cyprus, , P.O. Box 20537, CY 1678, Nicosia, Cyprus Introduction > [...]

Future time perspective has been found to significantly influence people's cognitive preferences, social choices, and subjective well-being across adulthood. While increasing chronological age is considered as a natural correlate of more limited future time perspective, few studies have investigated other factors related to individual differences in future time perspective. Based on a sample of 372 participants of a wide age range, the current study tested sense of control as an important determinant of future time perspective and a moderator of the association between age and future time perspective. Three different components of future time perspective, extension (FTE), opportunity (FTO), and constraint (FTC), were tested separately. Consistent with the expectation, higher sense of control was related to more open-ended future time perspective (higher FTE and FTO, lower FTC). More importantly, sense of control significantly moderated the associations between age and two components of future time perspective (FTE and FTC). For individuals with high sense of control, older age was no longer related to more limited future time perspective. The results highlight the importance of sense of control in maintaining a positive perception of future time and suggest that psychological resource can interact with chronological age to influence future time perspective., Author(s): Tianyuan Li [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.419993.f, 0000 0004 1799 6254, Department of Psychology and Centre for Psychosocial Health, Education University of Hong Kong, , 10 Lo Ping Road, [...]

Life satisfaction (LS) is one of the key elements of subjective wellbeing (SWB). The Temporal Satisfaction with Life Scale (TSWLS; Pavot et al. 1998 (See CR25)) measures LS including its temporal aspects, and provides scores for past, present, and future LS. The aim of this study was to replicate the three-factor structure found in previous studies in a Spanish-speaking general population, to analyze potential differences in temporal LS on different age groups and gender, and to explore the relationships between past, present, and future LS and the affective components of SWB (positive and negative mood). The sample consisted on 491 participants with an age range of 18 to 80 years old (M = 32.07, SD = 14.59). Confirmatory factor analysis, bivariate Pearson's correlations, and multiple regression analyses were conducted. Results confirmed the three-factor structure of the scale and its good psychometric properties. All participants showed higher levels of present LS than past LS, and older respondents presented higher levels of present LS than future LS. No gender differences were found, but younger respondents scored higher on future LS than older ones. Significant correlations were found between mood and temporal LS, and happiness emerged as a predictor of present LS, whereas positive affect was a predictor of past and future LS. Negative mood played a minor role as a predictor of temporal LS. These findings shed light on the patterns of past, present, and future LS in different age groups, and contribute to the knowledge about how mood and temporal LS are related., Author(s): Alba Carrillo [sup.1] [sup.2] , Ernestina Etchemendy [sup.2] [sup.3] , Rosa M. Baños [sup.1] [sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.5338.d, 0000 0001 2173 938X, University of Valencia, , Valencia, Spain [...]

Purpose: The authors investigated the influence of social environmental variables and age at implantation on language development in children with cochlear implants. Method: Participants were 25 children with cochlear implants and their parents. Age at implantation ranged from 6 months to 42 months ([M.sub.age] = 20.4 months, SD = 22.0 months). Linguistic progress was assessed at 12, 18, 24, and 30 months after implantation. At each data point, language measures were based on parental questionnaire and 45-min spontaneous speech samples. Children's language and parents' child-directed language were analyzed. Results: On all language measures, children displayed considerable vocabulary and grammatical growth over time. Although there was no overall effect of age at implantation, younger and older children had different growth patterns. Children implanted by age 24 months made the most marked progress earlier on, whereas children implanted thereafter did so later on. Higher levels of maternal education were associated with faster linguistic progress; age at implantation was not. Properties of maternal language input, mean length of utterance, and expansions were associated with children's linguistic progress independently of age at implantation. Conclusions: In children implanted within the sensitive period for language learning, children's home language environment contributes more crucially to their linguistic progress than does age at implantation. Key Words: language development, children with cochlear implants (CIs), social environment, The acquisition of spoken language in children with cochlear implants (CIs) displays wide variation among individuals, which investigators have documented for different languages (for English, see Niparko et al., 2010; [...]

The influence of cognitive abilities and age on multitrial word recall performance was examined for different list segments (i.e., first, middle, and last) and across trials by having 2,497 participants ages 18-98 complete a multitrial word list test along with reference cognitive ability tests. As expected, higher episodic memory ability was associated with better recall on all list segments but with a smaller influence for the last items on the early trials. Performance improved across trials, but there were no relations of the fluid intelligence construct that might be postulated to be associated with effective strategy implementation with any of the recall measures. Advanced age was associated with lower levels of performance, but very few of the age relations were significant after the variation in the reference cognitive abilities was controlled for., The serial position effect, characterized by greater recall from the first and last portions of a list than from the middle portions, is well established in word list learning tasks [...]

This study examined the association between romanticism (operationalized as mean score on the Romantic Beliefs Scale) and age, sex, and ethnicity in a large community sample (N=436). Age was negatively correlated with romanticism scores; as age increased, romanticism scores decreased. No sex differences were found; men and women had similar, moderate scores. Although ethnicity largely was unrelated to romanticism, Asian/Pacific Islander participants were significantly more romantic than were African-American participants. DOI 10.2466/07.09.21.PR0.107.6.972-976

A revised version of the Quality Marriage Index (QMI) was used to examine demographic correlates of marital satisfaction. We administered the revised QMI to a sample of college students and [...]

Purpose: To investigate children&apos;s performance on a fast mapping task. Possible effects across age, dialect group, and clinical status were explored. Method: Participants between the ages of 4 and 9 saw a series of pictured events and heard novel verbs. The novel verbs were in intransitive, transitive, dative, and complement syntactic frames or argument structures. The children then had to answer questions about the novel verbs that revealed what meaning they had attached to them. The field-testing of a new assessment instrument provided the data for typically developing children and children with language impairment from 2 linguistic communities: (a) mainstream American English speaking and (b) African American English speaking. Strict criteria were used for the 529 participants that defined both their clinical and dialect status. Results: There were significant effects of age and clinical status on the participants&apos; ability to fast map a novel verb from its argument structure, but no significant effects for dialect. Conclusions: Regardless of dialect, children with specific language impairment have difficulty using syntactic frames to identify a likely meaning of a novel verb. In addition, the syntactic frames are differentially difficult, with complement structures being particularly hard. KEY WORDS: fast mapping, syntactic frames, AAE-speaking children, MAE-speaking children, The theory of syntactic bootstrapping (Gleitman, 1990) was developed to explain the process by which young children use their knowledge of language to acquire verb meaning. Unlike concrete nouns, the [...]

A study was conducted to investigate the effect of age, gender, and consumption of alcohol of the observer on the estimation of age and attractiveness of female faces. A total of 240 persons in bars and cafes rated the attractiveness of composite faces of immature and mature females. Findings indicate that heavy alcohol consumption does not interfere with age-perception tasks in men.

Preschoolers, elementary school children, and college students exhibited a spacing effect in the free recall of pictures when learning was intentional. When learning was incidental and a shallow processing task requiring little semantic processing was used during list presentation, young adults still exhibited a spacing effect, but children consistently failed to do so. Children, however, did manifest a spacing effect in incidental learning when an elaborate semantic processing task was used. These results limit the hypothesis that the spacing effect in free recall occurs automatically and constrain theoretical accounts of why the spacing between repetitions affects recall performance.

We examine whether hardship while growing up shapes subjective age identity, as well as three types of experiences through which it may occur. Drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that hardship in several domains during childhood and adolescence is associated with feeling relatively older and self-identifying as an adult in the late teens and twenties. Specifically, young people who as adolescents felt unsafe in their schools or neighborhoods, witnessed or were victims of violence, had fewer economic resources in the household, and lived in certain family structures, reported older subjective ages (by one or both measures). We find no evidence that hardship's association with subjective age is mediated by work responsibilities in adolescence or by anticipating a very curtailed life span, but entering adult roles earlier mediates or partially mediates many of these relationships.

We examined whether memory for distinctive events is influenced by aging. To do so, we used a semantic isolation paradigm in which people show superior memory for a word when it is presented in a list of items from a different semantic category (e.g., the word table is presented in a list of all bird exemplars) as compared with when the same word (table) is presented in a list of unrelated words. Results showed that both younger and older adults demonstrated an isolation effect in memory, although older adults showed a numerically smaller isolation effect than did younger adults. Results suggest that in contrast with previous findings (Cimbalo & Brink, 1982), older adults can take advantage of this type of distinctiveness to aid memory performance.

In the present study, we used the Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm to analyze the relationship between theme identifiability of word lists and false memories in adults and children. We conducted two normative studies to determine the identifiability levels for critical unpresented words in 40 associative lists in adults and in 16 associative lists in children. Then, in three experiments, false memories for critical words that were either easy or hard to identify were analyzed in adults and in children 4-5 years old and 11-12 years old. Opposite results were found for adults and children. Lists with highly identifiable critical words produced fewer false memories for adults but more false memories for children. These results suggest that, if they can identify critical words, adults use an identify-to-reject strategy to edit out false memories, whereas, in children, theme identification does not lead to the use of such a monitoring strategy.

A large-scale field survey (n = 592) was conducted in a suburban shopping mall to assess the impact of pleasant ambient scent on consumer spending as a function of shopper age. A citrus scent was systematically emitted into the shopping mall (or not) over several weeks, and as shoppers were about to exit the mall, they were intercepted to complete a survey. In the survey, respondents reported the amount of expenditures in the mall that day as well as their perceptions of the mall and demographic characteristics, such as age. The results indicate that shoppers spent significantly more in the mall with the presence of the pleasant ambient scent, but this result was true only among younger shoppers. Theoretical and practical implications of the reduced impact of ambient scent on older persons are discussed. Keywords: scent: ambient; odor; age; consumer; retail; expenditures

A multilevel modeling approach was used to investigate the influence of age composition in 70 urban preschool classrooms. A series of hierarchical linear models demonstrated that greater variance in classroom age composition was negatively related to development on the Child Observation Record (COR) Cognitive, Motor, and Social subscales. This was true when controlling for class size, general classroom quality, and socioeconomic status at the classroom level and for age, gender, and baseline ability at the child level. Additionally, to address possible concerns related to nonrandom assignment to classrooms, a series of models were run including variance in developmental age (i.e., baseline ability) at the classroom level and at the child level. The results were consistent for chronological age composition and developmental age composition at the classroom level; greater variance in classroom developmental age composition was negatively related to Time 2 scores on the COR Cognitive, Motor, and Social subscales. Furthermore, a cross-level interaction indicated that negative influence of greater variance in classroom developmental age composition was stronger for children older in developmental age. Implications for early childhood education policy are discussed. Keywords: preschool, mixed age, single age, age composition, Child Observation Record

The Identity Style Inventory-Revised for a Sixth-Grade Reading Level (ISI-6G) was administered to samples of community college students (N=99) and middle school and high school students (N=320). Tests of between-groups differences indicated that the college sample had a significantly lower mean diffuse-avoidant score on the ISI-6G than the middle and high school sample. In terms of actual assignment to identity styles, college students were significantly more likely to be classified as informational or normative, while the younger students were more likely to be diffuse-avoidant. The mean ages of participants for each of the three identity styles were compared, and it was found that diffuse-avoidant participants had the lowest mean age (15.54 years), while individuals with an informational orientation had the highest mean age (17.20 years). Results suggest that, in general, identity style evolves with age and maturity and the general trajectory or progression involves movement away from a diffuse-avoidant orientation. Findings are discussed in terms of current knowledge of neurocognitive development during adolescence and early adulthood. Keywords Identity * Identity style * Brain development * Executive function * Prefrontal cortex * Cross-sectional

To determine whether the effect of antidepressant exposure on suicide rate is modified by age and gender in Hungary, annual antidepressant prescription rates and suicide rates of about 10 million inhabitants between 1999-2005 were analyzed by age and gender groups. The suicide rate was inversely related to the increased use of antidepressants in both genders. The strongest association was found in the oldest age groups, where the increase in antidepressant use was highest, while there was no association in the under 20 or 50-69 age groups in either gender. Antidepressant prescription rate was related to suicide rate after controlling for divorce rate or unemployment rate, but not after controlling for alcohol consumption rate.

This study investigated the hypothesis that older adults would show age-related reductions in the tendency to worry in both their retrospective accounts and through cross-sectional age comparisons with a sample of younger adults. We also sought to determine whether age differences would be evident in psychological processes associated with a tendency to worry in general adult samples (intolerance of uncertainty and beliefs in the functional value of worry). Support was found for the hypothesized age-related reduction in worry in both retrospective reports among the older adults and cross-sectional age comparisons. Older adults were also found to report less intolerance of uncertainty and less belief in the functional value of worrying compared to younger adults. These findings suggest that worry-proneness is reduced in late adulthood and that a greater ability to tolerate uncertainty in life and to see less value in worrying may partially account for this. Developmental and contextual changes that may account for these findings are considered.

The extent to which intellectual performance is affected by age and schooling is explored. Results indicated that by and large performance improved with both age and schooling.

Three hypotheses for effects of age of acquisition (AoA) in lexical processing are compared: the cumulative frequency hypothesis (frequency and AoA both influence the number of encounters with a word, which influences processing speed), the semantic hypothesis (early-acquired words are processed faster because they are more central in the semantic network), and the neural network model (early-acquired words are faster because they are acquired when a network has maximum plasticity). In a regression study of lexical decision (LD) and semantic categorization (SC) in Italian and Dutch, contrary to the cumulative frequency hypothesis, AoA coefficients were larger than frequency coefficients, and, contrary to the semantic hypothesis, the effect of AoA was not larger in SC than in LD. The neural network model was supported.

Previous research suggests that, during visual search and discrimination tasks, older adults place greater emphasis than younger adults on top-down attention. This experiment investigated the relative contribution of target activation and distractor inhibition to this age difference. Younger and older adults performed a singleton discrimination task in which either an E or an R target (colour singleton) was present among distractor letters. Relative to a baseline condition in which the colours of the targets and distractors remained constant, an age-related slowing of performance was evident when either the colour of the target or that of the distractors varied across trials. The age-related slowing was more pronounced in response to target colour variation, suggesting that older adults place relatively greater emphasis on the top-down activation of target features.

Odor naming and recognition memory are poorer in children than in adults. This study explored whether such differences might result from poorer discriminative ability. Experiment 1 used an oddity test of discrimination with familiar odors on 6-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults. Six-year-olds were significantly poorer at discrimination relative to 11-year-olds and adults, who did not differ. Experiment 2 used the same procedure but with bard-to-name visual stimuli and compared only 6-year-olds with adults (as with the remaining experiments in this study). There was no difference in performance between these groups. Experiment 3 used the same procedure as Experiment 1 but with less familiar odors. Six-yearolds were significantly poorer at discrimination than adults. In Experiment 4 the researchers controlled for verbal labeling by using an articulatory suppression task, with the same basic procedure as in Experiment 1. Six-year-old performance was the same as for Experiment 1 and significantly poorer than that of adults. Impoverished olfactory discrimination may underpin performance deficits previously observed in children. These all may result from their lesser experience with odors, relative to adults. Keywords: olfaction, discrimination, learning, odor, children

Change in life satisfaction was modeled over a 22-year period in 1,927 men. A curvilinear relationship emerged. Growth-curve models indicated that life satisfaction peaked at age 65 and then declined, but showed significant individual differences in rate of change. Extraversion predicted variability in change, with higher levels associated with a high and flat life satisfaction trajectory. Time-varying physical health and marital status were associated with higher life satisfaction. Proximity to death was associated with a decline in life satisfaction. On measurement occasions that were within 1 year before death, trajectories showed sleeper decline, and this effect was not attributable to declines in self-rated physical health. The findings are at odds with prior (cross-sectional) research showing that subjective well-being improves with aging.

This article reports on age differences in obtaining in-store information in the process of purchasing a gift.

Using story retelling as an index of language ability, it is difficult to disambiguate comprehension and memory deficits. Collecting data on the serial position effect (SPE), however, illuminates the memory component. This study examined the SPE of the percentage of information units (%IU) produced in the connected speech samples of adults with aphasia and age-matched, non-brain-injured (NBI) participants. The NBI participants produced significantly more direct and alternate IUs than participants with aphasia. Significant age and gender differences were found in subsamples of the NBI controls, with younger and female participants generating significantly more direct IUs than male and older NBI participants. Alternate IU productions did not generate an SPE from any group. There was a significant linear increase from the initial (primacy) to the final (recency) portion of the recalled alternate IUs for both the NBI group and the group of participants with aphasia. Results provide evidence that individuals with aphasia recall discourse length information using similar memory functions as the nonimpaired population, though at a reduced level of efficiency or quantity. A quadratic model is suggested for the recall of information directly recalled from discourse-length language material. KEY WORDS: serial position effect, memory, aphasia, story retelling, discourse, Aging brings a predisposition injury and disease that can affect cognitive and language functions. Among the most common diseases/disorders are dementia, head injury, and stroke. Investigators have reported decreased performance, [...]

Age invariance in monitoring associative learning has been the norm in numerous investigations concerning how accurately people predict future recall, predictions that are based partly on people&apos;s beliefs about forgetting. In this study, we obtained a measure of monitoring that is minimally influenced by beliefs about forgetting. Participants made quality-of-encoding (QUE) judgments by rating how well each item had been encoded. In 2 experiments, older and younger adults studied 60 paired-associate items; immediately after studying each one, they made a QUE judgment. Each item was presented at a 4-s or 8-s presentation rate. QUEs from both age groups were sensitive to the production of different strategies, presentation rate, and item characteristics. Reliable age differences in the correlation of QUEs and subsequent recall were found for related items but not for unrelated items. The outcomes indicate similar processes for generating QUE judgments by older and younger adults, but they also suggest the possibility of an age-related deficit in the accuracy of monitoring encoding in some experimental conditions.

This study further tested an associative-deficit hypothesis (ADH; M. Naveh-Benjamin, 2000), which attributes a substantial part of older adults' deficient episodic memory performance to their difficulty in merging unrelated attributes-units of an episode into a cohesive unit. First, the results of 2 experiments replicate those observed by M. Naveh-Benjamin (2000) showing that older adults are particularly deficient in memory tests requiring associations. Second, the results extend the type of stimuli (pictures) under which older adults show this associative deficit. Third, the results support an ADH in that older adults show less of an associative deficit when the components of the episodes used are already connected in memory, thereby facilitating their encoding and retrieval. Finally, a group of younger adults who encoded the information under divided-attention conditions did not show this associative deficit.

In the present study, we examined whether age modulates the processing of lexical and perceptual information in auditory implicit and explicit memory tests. Young and older adults performed a surface encoding task on spoken and printed words and then either identified degraded words or made explicit recognition judgments. The implicit test of perceptual identification yielded no evidence of age-related declines in the processing of either lexical information or coarse perceptual details (modality of presentation). The same test, however, produced marked age-related declines in the processing of fine-grained perceptual details (voice) when subjects were not familiarized with the talkers' voices prior to the encoding task. Marked age differences were also observed in recognition memory. These findings suggest that although aging preserves the encoding and incidental retrieval of lexical and coarse perceptual information, it affects the encoding of fine-grained perceptual information and deliberate retrieval processes.

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.

Byline: Sandra L. Harris (1), Jan S. Handleman (2) Keywords: Autistic disorder; age; IQ; placement in special education; applied behavior analysis Abstract: The predictive power of age and IQ at time of admission to an intensive treatment program using applied behavior analysis were examined in a 4- to 6-year follow-up of educational placement. Twenty-seven children with autistic disorder who were between the ages of 31 and 65 months and had IQs on the Stanford Binet between 35 and 109 at time of admission to the Douglass Developmental Disabilities Center were followed up 4 to 6 years after they left the preschool. The results showed that having a higher IQ at intake (M = 78) and being of younger age (M = 42 months) were both predictive of being in a regular education class after discharge, whereas having a lower IQ (M = 46) and being older at intake (M = 54 months) were closely related to placement in a special education classroom. The results are interpreted as pointing to the need for very early intervention for children with Autistic Disorder. It is also emphasized that older children and those with lower IQs in the present study showed measurable gains in IQ from treatment. The data should not be taken to suggest that children older than 4 years of age do not merit high quality treatment. Author Affiliation: (1) Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, New Jersey, 08854-8085 (2) Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, New Jersey, 08854-8085 Article History: Registration Date: 09/10/2004

Results from a mail survey of respondents aged sixty to ninety-four suggest that psychographic dimensions of youthfulness and identification with old age constitute effective inner-age research variables, especially to those seeking to study older populations. The two specific dimensions explored are: 'perceived youth,' a magnitude measure of the proportional discrepancy between chronological and cognitive ages; and 'feeling-old,' which inversely measured youth through reliance on a six-point Likert agree/disagree statement: 'I feel old .... ' In addition to the obvious inverse relationship between these inner-ages, research established trait covariation relative to an increase in perceived youth coincidental with a rejection of a feeling-old identity, corresponding to increases in 'happiness, own-health rating, being venturesome, giving advice, self-esteem, social activity, and keeping-in-shape,' as well as decreases in 'taking advice, being a homebody, and having health worries.'

This qualitative study used written narratives to examine gender and age patterns in body image, emotional expression, and self-esteem for a total of 209 boys and girls in the fifth, eighth, and twelfth grades. Seventy-six percent of the sample was Caucasian, 18% African-American, 5% Asian-American, and .5% Hispanic. A major finding indicates that boys restrict emotional expression from early adolescence through late adolescence, while girls increase emotional expression during the same age period. Another major finding suggests that girls in late childhood and adolescence are both more negatively and more positively influenced than boys by body image. Both boys' and girls' feelings about themselves are primarily influenced in gender-stereotyped ways.

A study on the missing-letter effect and its relationship to development was conducted. In two experiments, participants were given reading materials with target letters. The findings suggest that the structure of a word influences the missing-letter effect. The reader's sensitivity during content analysis to patterns of informative items accounts for developmental changes in the extent of the missing-letter effect. These suggest that familiarity and structural role must be considered in explaining letter detection errors in reading.

This study investigates age and gender differences in the relative perception of social support across adulthood. Findings indicate that age and gender do affect both the perception of positive support and the perception of demandingness across different support relationships. In all age groups, men appear to perceive spousal support as the most positive, while women seem to perceive the support received from children as being the most positive. However, it is apparent that all three relationships studied - those with spouse, children, and friends/other relatives - are important sources of support for both men and women. Key Words: Social support, Gender, Age

A comprehensive survey examined three age-role self-concepts: cognitive, ideal, and social ages. Participants were forty to sixty-nine years old and viewed themselves as middle-aged. The investigation reviewed inner-age research and evaluated inner-age infra-structure (with t-tests and correlations), as well as connections between inner-age and participants' characteristics (with covariates, partial correlations, and regressions) in the context of eight psychographic trait-sets (sex-identity, quality-of-life, health, self-consciousness, societal traits, venturesomeness, supermarket shopping involvement, and exercise activities). The three inner ages, while closely interrelated, diverged in their distribution patterns, in mean ages, as well as (after removal of birth age's linear effects) in their covariates and correlates.

Gender asymmetry in touch in U.S. populations is related to the age of the participants in some studies and to the relationships between the participants in others. In the present study, researchers observed dyads in public settings in the United States frequented by couples and recorded the occurrence of touch, the touch initiator, and the body areas touched. The researchers then approached the couples and asked them to complete questionnaires indicating their ages, their relationship, and their level of agreement on major issues. Age and relationship were predictive of the gender of touch initiators. Although levels of agreement were less predictive of touch initiation, the women indicated higher levels of agreement than the men did. The results were generally consistent with a model of sex differences in reproductive strategies., In recent years, there has been a rapid increase in the information available on sex differences in reproductive strategies (e.g., Bailey, Gaulin, Agyei, & Gladue, 1994; Buss & Schmitt, 1993). [...]

The Defense Style Questionnaire-40 is a 40 item short form of the 88 item Defense Style Questionnaire. A cross-cultural comparison was made between a sample of 635 Canadian university students and an Australian sample of 388 subjects reported by Andrews, Singh, and Bond. Differences between the two samples were noted for several of the defense scales. These may be a reflection of differential socialization patterns in coping with stress for the two countries. Gender and age comparisons were made for the 20 defense scales. Some interesting differences were noted for gender on the suppression, pseudoaltruism, and isolation scales. The internal structure of defense styles was also found to have similarities and differences for males and females with the DSQ-40.

The memory changes associated with age are attributed to the deterioration of the frontal lobes, as well as to the middle temporal structures. Therefore, in addition to a decline in memory for facts and events, as found impaired in amnesics, a memory decline associated with age is predicted for tasks typically found impaired in frontal lobe patients (i.e., temporal order judgment). There are conflicting findings concerning whether indirect measures of memory for facts and events are associated with age. However, there are no studies that address this issue with regard to temporal order judgment. Thirty younger and thirty older adults were tested on a list of words which was repeated five times in fixed or varying order. The number of words recalled, as well as their temporal judgments, were the direct measure of memory. The effect of consistency of order of presentation on the number of words recalled was the indirect measure of memory for temporal order. Results suggest that direct, but not the indirect measures of memory were related to age.

In this study we examined the prevalence and covariates of forgetfulness in a large sample of almost 2,000 subjects in the age range twenty-four to eighty-six years. Nearly 40 percent of the participants considered themselves to be forgetful. There was a systematic increase in the prevalence of forgetfulness with age, from 29 percent in the young age group to 52 percent in the oldest age group. Forgetfulness was not considered to be a serious problem in terms of perceived hindrance and worry by most subjects, independent of their age. Age, depression, and subjective health (especially complaints about vitality) acted as covariates of forgetfulness. Gender and education had no effect on the prevalence of forgetfulness. The younger adults ascribed their forgetfulness more to potentially reversible and manageable memory-extrinsic causes such as tension and emotional problems, whereas the older adults mentioned less manageable and more or less irreversible memory-intrinsic causes such as aging more often.