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Psychology of Aging > Chapter 8: Social Cognition > Flashcards

Chapter 8: Social Cognition Flashcards

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1
Q

What are stereotypes? Why do we have them?

A

Common social beliefs of a particular social group. We have them to help us quickly process information during social interactions.

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2
Q

The ability to estimate the age of someone by seeing their face ________ with age.

A

Decreases

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3
Q

Are older adults better or worse at judging the age of faces within their age group than younger individuals?

A

Better

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4
Q

How do older adult’s perspectives on aging differ from younger adults?

A

They have a more positive view of aging

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5
Q

How can believing in negative stereotypes about age negatively affect a person? There are 6 ways

A
  • Reduces will to live
  • Impairs memory
  • Reduces health promotion behaviors
  • Lengthens recovery time from illness
  • Increases cardiovascular reactivity to stress
  • Decreases longevity
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6
Q

What is the age-based double standard?

A

It is when a person attributes an older person’s failure in memory as more serious than a memory failure observed in younger adults.

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7
Q

How do perceptions of memory failure differ between older and younger adults?

A

Young adults view memory failures as more serious in older adults while older adults view memory failures as less serious in other older adults.

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8
Q

How do the perceptions of the causes behind memory failure differ between younger and older adults?

A

Both older and younger adults believe memory failure in older adults is caused by mental decline while memory failure in younger adults is caused by a lack of effort or attention.

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9
Q

According to research, how are older adults typically stereotyped across different cultures?

A

Warm and incompetent

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10
Q

What is implicit stereotyping?

A

Social beliefs that unconsciously affect our behavior

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11
Q

What were the results of John Bargh’s study of implicit stereotyping?

A

Young adults who were primed with an image of an elderly person showed changes in behavior based on their stereotypes. For example, young adults who were implicitly primed walked slower down the hall after the experiment than those who were not.

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12
Q

What was the Implicit Association Test?

A

It was a study to test implicit stereotyping. Individuals were asked to categorize faces as young or old and unpleasant or pleasant by pressing a button with their right or left hand. In the first part of the study, the right hand was associated with young and pleasant while the left hand was associated with old and unpleasant.In the seond part, the right hand is associated with old and pleasant while the left hand is associated with young and unpleasant.

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13
Q

What were the results of the Implicit Associaation Test?

A

People of all ages were faster to respond to young-pleasant and old-unpleasant trials than old-pleasant and young-unpleasant trials. All individuals unconsciously favored the young over the old.

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14
Q

What intervention stragety did Crisp and Turner create to help people change their implicit stereotyping? How do you do it?

A

Imagined intergroup contact. You imagine yourself having a positive interaction with a member of the group you have negative stereotypes of.

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15
Q

How has Crisp and Turner’s intervention stragety affected people? In what scenerios have there been greater results?

A
  • People who use this strategy have been reported to have reduced bias towards those who they negatively stereotyped.
  • Greater results can be seen in children and people who elaborate more on the details of the context their imagined interaction took place.
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16
Q

What is stereotype threat?

A

An evoked fear of being judged by a negative stereotype about a group that you belong in.

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17
Q

What were the results of Levy and Langer’s study on memory performance and attitudes of aging?

A

The results were that Chinese older adults (who have positive attitudes towards aging) outperformed hearing and deaf American older adults.

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18
Q

Why was Levy and Langer’s study controversial?

A

There were issues concerning the direction in which memory performance and positive attitudes were related, the possible education differences between the two cultural groups, and the language translation of the test from American to Chinese (hard to tell if it is the same test).

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19
Q

What were the details of Levy’s second study?

A

Levy primed younger and older adults with either negative or positive stereotypes of an older adult.

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20
Q

What were the results of Levy’s second study?

A

Older adults who were primed with negative stereotypes did worse on memory tests than older adults who were primed with positive stereotypes.

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21
Q

Self-perception of aging

A

Individual’s perceptions of their own age and aging

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22
Q

True or False. Middle-aged adults can be susceptible to older adult stereotypes.

A

True. If a middle-aged adult identify themselves with older adults then they may be susceptible to negative stereotypes and poorer performance.

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23
Q

True or False. Holding positive views of aging leads to bad outcomes

A

False. Holding positive views leads to many good outcomes like better health, well-being, and longer life.

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24
Q

What are the two frameworks that explain how having a postive view influences use?

A

Labeling Theory and Resilience Theory

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25
What is Labeling Theory?
When older adults confront an age-related stereotype, they are more likely to integrate it into their self perception.
26
What is Resilience Theory?
When an older adult confronts a negative stereotype, they will choose to reject it in favor of a more positive self perception.
27
What were the details of Kotter-Gruhn's study on self perceptions of aging and the effects of stereotypes on self perceptions?
Adults from a variety of ages were asked to indicate their felt age, desired age, and perceived age. Next, their physical health was then assessed by a health survey. Lastly, age related stereotypes were activated through a priming approach of rating faces with positive, negative, or neutral terms.
28
What were the results of Kotter Gruhn's study before the priming task?
Older adults felt, wanted to be, and looked younger than they actually were. Younger adults wanted to be older than they were and older adults wanted to be younger.
29
What were the results of Kotter Gruhn's study after the priming task?
- Older adults felt older regardless of positive or negative priming. - Participants at all ages who were in bad health wanted to be younger after experiencing negative priming. - All participants who were in bad health reported looking older after receiving a negative priming task.
30
What did investigators conclude in Kotter Gruhn's study?
Negative images of aging have more powerful effects than positive ones in determining self perceptions of aging.
31
Emotional Intelligence
A person's ability to recognize their own and other's emotions, differentiate between emotions, and use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior.
32
Emotional intelligence (increases/decreases) with age
Increases
33
Impression Formation
The way we form and revise first impressions of others
34
What is a common way for studying impression formation discussed in the textbook?
A common way for studying impression formation is to present information about a person to two groups of adults. One group gets positive info first while the other group gets negative information first. Then each group gets the opposite information and researchers see how older adults modified their impressions.
35
What were the results of the impression formation study for older adults?
When negative information was presented after initial positive portrayal, older adults changed their first impression from positive to negative. When positive information was shown after initial negative portrayal then there was less change in older adult's impression.
36
What were the results of the impression formation study for younger adults?
Younger adults changed their impressions to correspond with new information regardless of whether or not it was positive or negative.
37
Why do younger and older adults differ in impression formation?
Older adults rely more on life experiences and social rules of behavior when forming impressions while younger adults are more concerned with having consistent views based on the new information presented.
38
Negativity Bias
Occurs when people allow their initial negative impressions to stand despite following positive information since negative info is more striking than positive info.
39
Are older adults more likely or less likely to be subject to negativity bias?
More likely since older adults pay attention to and seek out emotional information more than young adults do
40
Older adults change their initial impression if new information is ________
Diagnostic (relevant or informative)
41
Are younger or older adults more likely to change their impression based on new info?
Younger adults
42
Why are older adults at a possible disadvantage when processing social info?
Older adults need more time to make a social judgment the same way young adults do which is difficult when the social context is cognitively demanding (under demands of time pressure or multiple distractions).
43
Social Knowledge
Knowledge of how to act in certain social situations based on previous experiences.
44
How we act in social situations and the type of social judgments we make are based on what three things?
- Having available stored representations of the social world or memories of past events - Having the ability to apply those memories to various situations - How much easy access you have to the memories
45
What are implicit theories of personality? How do they impact the impressions we have on others?
They are our personal theories of how personality should work. If a person's behavior is inconsistent with our implicit theory of how they should behave then our impression of them is affected.
46
True or False. The degree to which social information is easily accessible and remembered determines the extent that info will guide social judgments or behavior.
True. Accessibility depends on the strength of the information stored in memory. Having extensive past experience with people who have a certain personality trait will have a highly accessible social knowledge of features of this certain personality trait. For example, if you have known lots of people who are aggressive in the past, then you would be able to recognize the features of an agressive person very quickly like dominace in social situations, highly competitive, etc.
47
Source judgment
Determining the source of a particular piece of information
48
What do older adults rely on more when making source judgments? How can this affect their judgments?
Easily accessible knowledge. It can lead them to making false judgments about where they got a piece of information.
49
Are older adults more or less susceptible to social judgment biases? Why?
More. They have trouble distinguishing between true and false information.
50
What study did Chen and colleagues perform to test older adult's susceptibility to false information? What were the results of the study?
They had older adults read criminal reports and instructed them to disregard the false information printed in red. Older adults had a hard time disregarding the false information which biased their judgment of how dangerous the criminal was and how long they think the criminal's prison sentence should be.
51
Neuroimaging indicates that damage or age-related changes to parts of the __________ may be responsible for increased susceptibility to false info.
Prefrontal cortex
52
According to Gilbert and Malone, the ability to make unbiased social judgments depends on what?
The cognitive demand accompanying those judgments.
53
In the case of impression formation, Gilbert and Malone would state that older adults do not adjust their initial impressions after facing new information because ..........
Older adults have lower levels of cognitive processing resources
54
Casual Attributions
Explanations of why behaviors occur
55
The two types of casual attributions are ........
Dispositional and Situational
56
Dispositional attribution
Casual attribution that concludes the cause resides within the actor (their personality)
57
Situational attribution
Casual attribution that concludes the cause resides outside of the actor (outside forces)
58
When it comes to memory failures, people tend to make more ___________ attributions towards older adults and more ___________ towards younger adults.
Dispositional and Situational
59
What is Correspondence Bias? Which age group has the tendency to show this type of bias?
It is the tendency to draw inferences about older people's dispositions based on behavior that can be fully explained through situational factors. Emerging adults tend to show this type of bias a lot.
60
Give an example of correspondence bias
You see your professor walking down the hall. You ask them a question but they ignore you. You assume that they are arrogant because they did not answer your question; however, you failed to realize that your professor was talking on the phone.
61
What study did Blanchard- Fields conduct to observe the differences in casual attributions between young, middle, and older adults?
She presented participants with different situations (that had either positive or negative outcomes) and asked participants if the main character, the situation, or a mix of both were responsible for the event.
62
What were the results of Blandchard Fields's study?
All adults tended the outcome of the situation was a mix of both the main character and the situation but older adults did it at a higher rate. Older adults also blamed the main character more than younger groups (especially in negative relationships).
63
According to Fields, why were older adults more predispositioned in blaming the main character and using less reasoning in negative outcomes?
They quickly judged the main character using their own strong social beliefs that they have thanks to their stage in life and the cohort that they grew up in. When the main character went against their strong social belief (marriage comes before career) then they made snap judgments of them without considering other factors.
64
How do personal goals differ between younger and older adults?
Young adults strive mainly for achievement (ex. completing a college degree/starting a career) while middle/older adults strive for a balance between functioning independently and sharing their lives with others.
65
According to the SOC model, how and why do interests shift in our personal goals?
Our interest shift from striving for excellence to physical health and socio-emotional domains. We change our interests because our physical and cognitive limitations increase.
66
What is the positivity effect?
It is when older adults avoid negative information and focus more on positive information when making decisions and judgments.
67
how do older and younger adults differ in perceiving positive and negative stimuli?
Older adults pay more attention to positive than negative stimuli while younger adults pay attention to positive and negative stimuli equally.
68
How can emotional goals help older adults?
They can create a supportive context for their cognitive functioning. For instance, research suggests that distinctiveness of emotions helps older adults reduce the number of false memories produced.
69
How can a focus on only positive information interfere with decision- making in older adults?
It can lead older adults to miss out on important negative information necessary to make a quality decision.
70
What does the SAVI (Strength and Vulnerability Integration) model say about older adults ability to regulate emotions during high arousal situations?
Older adult's ability to regulate emotions in highly distressing situations is much harder because of their physiological vulnerabilities; therefore, they focus more on the positive.
71
Cognitive style
How we approach solving problems
72
Researchers argue changes in resources in aging (ex. declining working memory) may lead to a (increase/decrease) in a need for closure in older adults
Increase
73
Personal control
The degree to which that one believes that their performance in a situation depends on something that one personally does.
74
How does a person's sense of control over their health change as they get older?
There are no changes in a person's sense of control over their health until they reach 70. After this, their sense of control declines.
75
How can personal control be potentially maladaptive?
It can be maladaptive when it leads to a sense of invisibility even in the face of poor health. It can make the person unwilling to seek medical health when they need it.
76
Maintaining a sense of control throughout adulthood is linked with what?
- Better social relationships - Better health - Higher cognitive fuctioning
77
What are the three interdependent processes that Brandstadter proposed preserves and stabilizes a positive view of self in later life?
- Assimilative Activities - Accommondations - Immunimizing mechanisms
78
What are assimilative activities? Provide an example
- Activities that prevent or alleviate losses in domains that are personally important for self-esteem and identity. - People using memory aids because good memory is an important aspect of self-esteem and identity
79
What are accommodations? Provide an example
They are readjustments of goals and aspirations to lessen or neutralize the effects of negative self-evaluations in key domains. - A person increasing their target time to walk a mile because they noticed that it takes them longer
80
How do Heckhausen, Wrosch, and Schulz view control? How do they define control strategies?
- They view control as a motivational system that regulates individual's ability to control important outcomes over the life span. - They define control-based strategies as primary control and secondary control.
81
What are primary control strategies? Provide an example
- Strategies that involve bringing the environment in line with one's desires and goals (changing the external world). - Actively searching for another job after you lose your other job
82
What are secondary control strategies? Provide an example?
- Strategies that involve bringing oneself in line with the environment (changing how you feel and think about the situation). - Thinking about how you really didn't like your last job
83
How does primary and secondary control change over one's lifespan?
- Primacy control is high across one's lifespan but it peaks around midlife. - Secondary control increases more as people age where it will eventually approach the same level as primary striving.
84
Why does secondary control increase with age?
Maintenance of primacy control increasingly depends on secondary control as our bodies decline with age.
85
How do adults across a lifespan differ in how they relate control to well-being?
Young and middle-aged adults relate control to how well they overcome failure while older adults relate control to how well they can do everyday tasks.
86
What are some criticisms stated regarding primary control theories?
There may be a bias toward Western culture in this theory since studies show that collectivist countries have been shown to exceed Western cultures in levels of secondary control and emotion-focused coping.
87
Collaborative Cognition
Two or more people work together to solve a cognitive task.
88
How does cognitive performance change with collaborative cognition?
It increases
89
What are the benefits of collaborative cognition?
Optimizing the decision, enhancing the relationship, and compensating for individual weaknesses.

Psychology of Aging (10 decks)

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