Social Cognition

Question 1

What is a stereotype?

Answer 1

Beliefs about a social group that affects how behaviour is interpreted
- Process information when engaged in social interactions

Question 2

What is a stereotype threat?

Answer 2

When negative beliefs about your group interferes with performance
- More when salient
- Direct threat to cognitive performance

Question 3

How can stereotype threat affect older people’s cognition?

Answer 3

Increases the decline of cognition, IF you believe it to be true
- Not productive
- Cannot learn
- Dependant on others
- Reduces will to live
- More rigid, cant adapt

Question 4

What are the two theoretical ideas about how older adults handle stereotypes of aging?

Answer 4

• Labelling theory
• Resilience theory

Question 5

Labeling theory

Answer 5

Tendency to apply the stereotype to yourself with confrontation of an age-related stereotype
- Older people are more likely to do it
- Impression formation and priming of stereotypes support it
- Negative self-perception of age

Question 6

Resilience Theory

Answer 6

Tendency to confront the negative stereotypes that leads to rejection of said stereotype
- Distance oneself from negative stereotypes
- Positive self-perception of age

Question 7

What are the aspects in social judgement?

Answer 7

• Emotional intelligence
• Impression formation
• Accessibility of social information
• Context influence
• Processing capacity

Question 8

What is emotional intelligence and its two aspects?

Answer 8

The ability to recognize emotional information about oneself and others, identify it, contrast it and use it to guide thinking and behavior
1. Seen as a trait, a persons self-perceived dispositions and abilities, crystal intelligence
2 Being able to understand and process emotional information an apply them in the right context, success-rate , fluid intelligence

Question 9

How does emotional intelligence change over the years?

Answer 9

Increases with life experiences
- Association with subjective well-being, may be the reason
- Specific ability to perceive others emotions declines

Question 10

What is impression formation?

Answer 10

Forming a first impression, happens within 10 seconds, and being able to revaluate it
- Flexibility

Question 11

How does impression formation change?

Answer 11

Positive to negative
- Older adult seem more willing to change
Negative to positive
- Older adult maintain their first impression

Question 12

Negativity Bias

Answer 12

Negative information creates a stronger impression than positive

Question 13

What can interfere with formation processing?

Answer 13

• Emotional information has more weight
• Older seems for sensitive to diagnosticity of available information
• Social context
• More resources to go through with negative information, higher arousal

Question 14

Social Knowledge

Answer 14

Using previous experiences and learned information and applying them to new situations
- Availability and accessible

Question 15

Attributional Biases

Answer 15

What kind of explanation you’re giving to explain others behavior
- Dispositional, within a person
- Situational, with in the context

Question 16

Correspondence Bias

Answer 16

Relying on dispositional attributes instead of situational
- Fundamental attribution bias
- Younger adults draw inferences of older peoples behavior
- Ignoring critical information, more stereotypes

Question 17

How does the correspondence bias change with age?

Answer 17

Younger adult
- More prone
- Contributes to stereotypes
Older
- Consider both types of information to draw inferences
- Life experiences

Question 18

What can affect the tendency to use correspondence bias?

Answer 18

• If a situation is unclear, too ambiguous
• Relationship situations
  Older tend to be more prone to the bias
• Existing beliefs
  Older use this bias more
• Culture differences
  Collective vs individualistic

Question 19

Positivity Effect

Answer 19

Tendency to avoid more negative information and focus positive when making decisions or judgments as well as remembering events

Question 20

What is SAVI?

Answer 20

Strength and vulnerability integration model
- Difficult to regulate high levels of negative arousal when getting older
- Positive arousal reduces the load

Question 21

How does positivity effect relate to SOC models?

Answer 21

• SOC suggest development occurs as we continuously update our personal goal in comparison to our resources available
• Focus on physical health and socio-emotional domains
• Goal selection, often toward retaining autonomy
• Emotional goals, supportive context for their cognitive functioning
• Optimizing our well-being

Question 22

What is personal control?

Answer 22

My actions are what affected my performance
- Entity (innate) vs Skill (learned)
- Multidimensional
- Linked to better quality of social relationships, better health and higher cognitive functioning

Question 23

Heckhausen - Strategy for maintaining control

Answer 23

• Control as motivational system to regulate individuals abilities to control outcomes throughout life
• Primary control strategies
  Change of environment; Loss of friends makes you look out for new ones, more adaptive
• Secondary control strategies, cognitively changes, seeing a situation from a different point of view, minimize losses
• Primary used more in early and middle adulthood
• Primary is what you strive for most
• When function decline, use of secondary increases

Question 24

What are some of the critics to Heckhausen’s theory?

Answer 24

• Age-related changes in goals and maintaining control could be a result of living, life experiences
• Cultural differences, focus on individualistic strategies vs collectivistic

Question 25

Collaborative Cognition

Answer 25

Better together than alone, to remember something or solving a cognitive task
- Enhance cognition, especially memory and problem-solving tasks
- Compensation
- Two people, close relationship and a long period of time together

Question 26

Why is collaborative cognition considered an example of SOC?

Answer 26

• Its implicit, it just happens
• Compensatory for cognitive decline
• Selective of situations that promotes collaborative cognition
• Optimizing resources by relying on others expertise