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Two experiments compared automatic semantic and episodic priming effects in adult aging. In the 1st experiment, target words were semantically primed; in the 2nd experiment, targets were primed by repetition of semantically unrelated words. Both experiments involved a pronunciation task with response signals at fixed times following target onset. Consequently, priming was measured as improvement in the percentage of correct responses. Priming was also calculated with speed-accuracy measures of intercept and slope. Both types of priming effect were significant in the percentage correct and slope measures, but no age group differences were found. Furthermore, the magnitudes of the priming effects were equivalent. The age-resistant nature of semantic and episodic priming, as well as evidence for a common theoretical mechanism, is discussed.

To measure age differences in the rate of semantic priming, studies vary the prime-target interval in lexical decision (LD) tasks. This provides no time limit on the target response. Thus, older adults' greater response times (RTs) could offer them more accumulated priming at the response compared with younger, faster adults. This study used a response deadline procedure in an LD task to equalize processing time across age groups. Although RTs did not significantly differ across age groups, older adults showed larger semantic priming effects than young adults. Semantic priming was also found with response accuracy (d'), but did not differ across age.

Subjects (39 men and 30 women) from two university counseling centers and one university medical center were administered the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, the Buss-Durkee Hostility Inventory, the State-Trait Anger Scale, and the Hostility and Direction of Hostility Questionnaire. Results showed significant positive correlations between self-reported severity of depression and all subtypes of hostility including behavior, attitude, affect, intropunitiveness, and extrapunitiveness. Hierarchical regression analysis using demographic and hostility variables as predictors of depression scores showed increasing age, lower education, and female gender to account for 50% of the explained variance. The Intropunitive subscale from the Hostility and Direction of Hostility Questionnaire accounted for an additional 19% of the explained variance and was the single most powerful predictor of depression. Correlational analysis showed women tending to have higher scores on most hostility measures. Implications of these results with respect to theory and clinical practice are discussed.

This study reports a meta-analysis comparing the size of semantic priming effects on young and older adults' lexical decision and pronunciation latency. The analysis included 15 studies with 49 conditions varying the semantic relatedness of a prime stimulus (single word or whole sentence) and a target word. An effect-size analysis on the difference between young and older adults' semantic priming effect (unrelated minus related latency) indicated that semantic priming effects are reliably larger for older than for young adults. There was no evidence for nonhomogeneity in this age difference across the different conditions. The relationship between young and older adults' semantic priming effects was described by a function with a positive intercept and a slope of 1.0. This pattern of findings favors aging models postulating process-specific slowing rather than general cognitive slowing.