Lecture 6 - Stability, Change and Ageing Flashcards
What are the 4 psychological constructs in this lecture
- Intelligence
- Performance
- Personality
- Mood (emotion)
What are the 5 that influence trait expression
- Social Demands
- Expectations
- Social Values
- Biology
- Individual circumstances (etc)
- These factors all change with age
What are the 3 areas that Roberts & Mroczek (2008) said people change in?
- Warmth
- Self-growth
- Emotional Stability
Outline contextual change of being young
For instance, in the 1930s
- Being young meant you were hard working
In the 1950s
- being young meant you were rebellious
Outline Contextual change of being middle-aged
- In the 1940s, being middle age was at a lot younger of an age
- In 2000s, it is at an older age, when you are considered middle aged
Define Age Change
Change to attributalble chronological age
- distance from birth
Define cohort effects
Differences between groups of (similary aged) indivduals who share a common experience
Outline Raven’s Progressive Matrice’s and the different ones for ages
Different versions for different ages:1
- Coloured Progressive Matrices: 4-11 years
- Standard Progressive Matrices: 11-18 years
- Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices: Adults
Mainly non-verbal stuff, like pattern completion
Outline the Wechsler Abbreaviated Intelligence Scale
- NOT THE WAIS
- Currently in its 2nd revision: WASI-II
- for ages 6-90
- Abbreviated version of the original one, specifically related to age
- 4 subsets, 30 mins each:
1. Similarities - Picture/ word shared characteristics
2. Vocabulary - Word and Picture description
3. Matrix Reasoning - Pattern completion on paper
4. Block Design - Pattern completion with blocks
Items 2 and 3 have 2 subsets of 15 minutes each
Outline some vocabulary tests of intelligence
- Sometimes known as Knowledge, or verbal fluency
- Could be having to tell the researcher the meaning of some words, like what does bed mean?
- Then gets harder, words like:
• Repair
•Conceal
• Edifice
•Ominous
•Travesty
Or name as many animals as possible within this category:
• Dogs, cats, birds, fish etc
Outline a Block Design - visual/ spatial ability test of intelligence
given 9 blocks with shapes on them
- have to rearrange them into a pattern
What did Wechsler (1958) find about the scores on the WASI tests, and age?
- As people got older, they got worse
- The mean scores of different cohorts, of different ages, decresead as participants got older
X - cohort effects? they were different people at different age points, so can you compare them?
What did Schaie (1994) found in response to wechslers results?
- Cross-sectional (like wechsler did), meant scores got worse with age
- But when they did a Longitudinal, scores didnt really change with age, and fluctuated up and down throughout life
what is a limitation of Cross-sectional studies?
X - Results can be contaminated by cohort effects
- something that influenced one group but not another group later on
- E.g. disease
What is a limitation of using Longitudinal studies
√ - can demonstrate the long period of stability, folloed by heterogeneous decline
X - But can Only really show one variable, as decline could be greater/ worse on some tasks than others
Outline the Hold and Dont hold tasks
- Hold tasks - can show deteoriation
- e.g. Verbal stuff in the WASI-II
- Information, comprehension, Arithmetic, Similarities, Digit-span, Vocabulary
- They are based on knowledge that is taught, and can therefore fade
- Especially in cases of Az etc
- Dont Hold Tasks - Cannot deteriorate
- E.g. performance scale in WASI-II
- Digit symbol, Picture completion, Block Design, Picture Arrangement, Object assembly
- Visual and spatial reasoning task
- Dont fade because they are not about knowledge, they can just pass the tasks cos they’re good at it for instance
Outline Fluid intelligence and Crystallised intelligence
- Fluid intelligence
- Innate intellectual power
- Think logically and solve new problems
- Not learnt - Crystallised Intelligence
- Uses experience and education
- Wisdom and knowledge - that has been learnt
Outline Horn (1970) study into the levels of Crystallised, Fluid and General intelligence
- Tracked levels of fluid intelligence, crystallised intelligence and general IQ over age, longitudinal
- Over time - fluid intelligence (innate) reduces
- Over time - crystallised intelligence (taught) increases
- General IQ as a result of this trade off, stays pretty much the same, and if anything gets a tiny bit better with age
What did Schaie (1990, 2004) do?
Seattle Longitudinal Study
Outline the Seattle Longitudinal study (Schaie, 1990, 2004) methods
Looked at individual differences in intellectual change
- Study Began in 1956
- Looked at Cognitive ageing, personality and lifestyle
- Inductive reasoning, spatial, memory, verbal tasks etc
- Longitudinal design to see the path of these variables
Outline the Seattle Longitudinal study (Schaie, 1990, 2004) findings
50-59: average decline, affects a minority of measures and individuals. When people hit 50, they may slow down and abilities slightly decline. Key age where these abilities start to decline
75-79: Average decline affects most measures and individuals. At this age, most abilities decline, at quite a large rate
But at 80: they have hit the point where they cant have any further decline in this ability. So it stops declining
Evaluations of Seattle Longitudinal Study
X - didnt study anything to do with dementia or alzheimers
√ - see decline in different types of ability of tasks
What are some issues with testing aging and intellectual ability?
X - conducting studies in the lab, not as ecological valid as intellect in the real world
- dont refelct real world
- Just a snapshot of ability
- Demand characteristics
What did Wilkinson & Allison (1989) find about reaction time?
- RT Got worse as people aged, but then got better again
- Gets more stable over time
Outline Rabbitt et al (2001) reaction time
- Did a Choice Reaction Time Task
- Where participants have to do lots of things at once -better ecological validity as people in real world have
- Found lots of variability between people, but also variability within participants
- Got different scores on different days and on different tasks
- Highlights importance of the types of tasks you test people with
X - practice effects for repeated tasks
Why might performance measures decrease with age?
- Increasing age just means there is greater caution
- This allows more information to accumulate before making a decision
- This results in fewer erros
- Cautious of making mistakes, and monitoring their progress
- This explains why their performance declines, its not that their cognitive ability is declining
- They could be using their additional experience to think more
What did Hampson & Goldber (2006) do about the stability of Big 5 traits?
Looked at the BIG 5 traits
- 2404 Primary school children assessed from 1959-1967
- About 400 followed up 1998-2004
- At both points, 2 measurements were taken
- Examine strenght of correlations within and between childhood and adulthood
What did Hampson & Goldber (2006) find about the stability of Big 5 traits? - what were the findings?
- Stability across 40 years - childhood to adulthood is greater for extraversion and conscientiousness
- Instead of openness, agreeableness and neuroticism
What did Milojev & Sibley (2014) do for personality across the lifespan
Looekd at the BIG 6 traits across time
- Surveyed nearly 3910 New Zealanders aged from 20-80
- Questionnaires measuring the big 6 two years apart
Outline Milojev & Sibley (2014) results
- Rank ordering of scores within the sample was relatively stable
- But stability varied by age
- Increasing Stability from 20-50 years old
- Decreasing Stability from 50+ to age 80
Extraversion was most stable
Agreeableness least stable
What do studies show about personality and ageing then?
- Some traits are more ‘state’ like than others
- Moderate age continuity among the big 5, especialyl extraversion
- Greater continuity in the component attributes of each trait
Outline Woodruff (1983) - Do we change as much as we think we do?
1944: University students tested for ‘personal & social adjustment’
25 years later
1969: retested under 2 conditions:
1. Complete as you remember yourself 25 years earlier
2. Complete as you are now
What was Woodruff (1983)’s results?
The remembered answers were inaccurate
- they overestimated change
- People had changed less than they thought they had
Outline Robins et al (2005) methods
- 290 first year UG students complete assessments of Big 5 personality traits
- then 4 years later, after graduation, they were asked: •to rate the degree of change on big 5
•And had to retake the Big 5 test as well - So they were asked how much they had changed, then tested to see how much they had changed
Outline Robins et al (2005) findings
- Again, people thought they had changed more than they had
- They thought they had become more extraverted, agreable, conscientious and open, and less neurotic
- But this wasnt the case, their personality traits hadnt changed much over time
- Also found positive correlations between these judgements and their actual scores. So if they thought they had become more open, they rated themselves as such
What is a limitation of Robins et al (2005)
X - Only over 4 years, not very long
- usually, longitudinal studies go over like 25/ 30 years
What are the 2 contrasting theorys of emotional change over age?
- Disengagement theory (Cumming & Henry, 1961)
2. Development of emotion (Lawrie & Phillips, 2016)
Outline Disengagement theory
Emotion DOES change
- As we grow, we become withdrawn from social activities and society
- But this theory argues that this is okay, and this is normal
- As a student, you join groups and get involved in society
- But as you age, you become more focused on work and become more individualistic
- But this is okay to disengage from life and from peers as we age
Outline development of emotion (Lawrie & Phillips, 2016)
- Argues disengagement theory is too simple
- As it ignores cultural and situational factors
- This theory argues as we age, we get better at regulation of emotions - we develop superior emotional regulation
