Personal goals play a major role in creating direc­tion in our lives. They consist of underlying moti­vations for our behavior and how we perceive our own ever-changing environment. Across the life span, personal goals change to match our needs, with young adults striving mainly for achieve­ment, like completing a college degree or starting a career, […]

LEARNING OBJECTIVES • How do goals influence the way we process information, and how does this change with age? • How do emotions influence the way we process information, and how does this change with age? • How does a need for closure influence the way we process information, and how does it change with […]

Who was the investigator and what was the aim of the study? Yiwei Chen and Fredda Blanchard-Fields (1997) tested the idea that processing resource limitations accounted for the dispositional bias typically observed in older adults. Does older adults’ limited resource capacity prevent them from adjusting initial dispositional biases? In addition, would older adults engage in […]

For many years, we have known that college students typically produce informational distortions when making causal attributions about problem solving (e. g., Gilbert & Malone, 1995). This is typically called correspondence bias. In this case, youth rely more on dispositional information in explaining behav­ior and ignore compelling situational information such as extenuating circumstances. For example, […]

LEARNING OBJECTIVES • What are causal attributions? • What is the correspondence bias? • How does the nature of our causal attributions change with age? • What alternative explanations are there for the dispositional bias found in older adults? E rin is cleaning up after her son, who spilled his dinner all over the table […]

Two interesting developmental questions arise with respect to social knowledge structures. First, does the content of our social knowledge and beliefs change as we grow older? And second, how do our knowledge structures and beliefs affect our social judgments, memory, problem solving, and more? There are many types of belief systems, which differ in content […]

LEARNING OBJECTIVES • What are social knowledge structures? • What are social beliefs, and how do they change with age? A nna is going on her first date since the death of her husband one year ago. She is 62 years of age and was married for 30 years, so she is extremely nervous about […]

Based on the research discussed so far, it appears that processing resource limitations play an impor­tant role in understanding how older adults process and access social information. In fact, social cogni­tive researchers use information-processing models to describe how individuals make social judgments (e. g., Gilbert & Malone, 1995). For example, Gilbert and his colleagues have […]

When we are faced with new situations, we draw on our previous experiences stored in memory, in other words, our social knowledge. The content of those experiences and knowledge and how easily we can retrieve it will affect what types of social judgments we make and how we behave in social situations. If you are […]

LEARNING OBJECTIVES • What is the negativity bias in impression formation, and how does it influence older adults’ thinking? • Are there age differences in accessibility of social information? • How does processing context influence social judgments? • To what extent do processing capacity limitations influence social judgments in older adults? A lexandra and Klaus […]