The general consensus about personal control is that it is multidimensional (Lachman, Rosnick, & Rocke, 2009; Soederberg, Miller, & Lachman, 1999a). Specifically, one’s sense of control depends on which domain, such as intelligence or health, is being assessed. As can be seen from Figure 8.5, Grob, Little, and Wanner (1999) found an increase for perceived […]

LEARNING OBJECTIVES • What is the multidimensionality of personal control? • How do assimilation and accommodation influence behavior? • What is primary and secondary control? • What is the primacy of primary control over secondary control? D aniel did not perform as well as he thought he was going to on his psychology exam. He […]

A major controversial issue in the cognitive aging literature is whether living in a society that equates old age with memory decline, senility, and dependency produces what Langer (1989) calls a "premature cognitive commitment" early in life. As children we acquire ideas of what it means to be old, usually negative, and these stereotypes guide […]

Another important question to ask is whether implicit negative stereotypes of aging influence the cognitive functioning of older adults. This possibility is raised in the context of widely cited social psycho­logical research on stereotype threat. Claude Steele and colleagues have conducted a number of studies suggesting that stigmatized groups such as African Americans and women […]

From the preceding review of research we know that stereotypes of older adults exist in the form of personality traits and perceptions of competence. They also influence our judgments about how capa­ble older adults will be in memory-demanding situ­ations. However, it is not enough to know that the stereotypes exist; we need to know under […]

Stereotypes are not simply reflected in our percep­tions of what we think are representative personal­ity traits or characteristics of older adults. We also make appraisals or attributions of older adults’ competence when we observe them perform tasks,and we assess whether we can count on them to perform important tasks. No area is more suscep­tible to […]

Stereotypes are a special type of social knowledge structure or social belief. They represent socially shared beliefs about characteristics and behaviors of a particular social group. We all have stereotypes of groups of individuals and beliefs about how they will act in certain situations, such as “Older adults will be more rigid in their point […]

LEARNING OBJECTIVES • How does the content of stereotypes about aging differ across adulthood? • How do younger and older adults perceive the competence of the elderly? • How do negative stereotypes about aging unconsciously guide our behavior? M ark, a 70-year-old man, was getting ready to go home from a poker game at his […]

Another type of motivational goal that can influence our thinking comes from our cognitive style, or how we approach solving problems. Examples include a need for closure and the inability to tolerate ambiguous situations. People with a high need for closure pre­fer order and predictability, are uncomfortable with ambiguity, are closed-minded, and prefer quick and […]

We will examine the idea of socio-emotional selec­tivity with aging in Chapter 10. For the purposes of this chapter you need to know that this theory maintains that emotional goals become increasingly important and salient as we grow older (Carstensen, 1995; Carsetensen et al., 2003). It is primarily a motivational model, which posits that the […]