Social Cognition and Personality

1. Social Cognition and Personality November 14th, 2007

2. Just To Reiterate... • Social judgements are made quickly. • Although older adults have been in numerous social situations in their lives (i.e., have a lot of knowledge), if they can’t access it, those won’t guide their judgements. • Hence having access to social information is very important.

3. Tonight’s Lecture • What is the role of emotion as we age? • How do stereotypes affect older adults? • What is collaborative cognition and how does it impact older adults? • We will then talk about how personality and identity are affected by age.

4. Emotion in Later Life (Lawton, 2001) • Affect Salience: No age difference • Affect Frequency: • Do not appear to differ in frequency of negative affect, but less positive affect. • Effect of health? • Change in valence less apparent in longitudinal than cross-sectional studies. • Affect Intensity: Mixed evidence • Self-ratings less intense. • Emotion on the spot show no age differences.

5. Emotion in Later Life • Emotion regulation: Perceived control of emotion greater with age. • Theories: • Control theory of late-life emotion (Schulz and Heckhausen, 1998) • Integration of cognition and emotion in late life (Labouvie-Vief et al., 1989) • Blanchard-Fields (1998): Ability to use accommodative strategies. • Socioemotional selectivity theory (Carstensen, 1995)

6. Cognitive Style as a Processing Goal • People with high need for closure and an inability to tolerate ambiguous situations • Prefer order and predictability • Are uncomfortable with ambiguity • Are closed-minded • Prefer quick and decisive answers • It may be that limited cognitive resources and motivational differences are both age-related • Declines in working memory may be related to need for closure

7. What Are Stereotypes? • A special kind of social knowledge structure or social belief that represent organized prior knowledge about a group of people that affects how we interpret new information. • Young and older adults hold similar stereotypes about aging

8. Age Stereotypes and Perceived Competence • An age-based double standard operates when people judge older adults’ failures in memory • In this case, younger adults judge older adults who are forgetful more harshly than older adults do • However, younger adults also make positive judgments about older adults being more responsible despite such memory failures

9. How Are Stereotypes Activated? • Implicit stereotypes • Automatically activated negative stereotypes about aging guide behavior beyond our awareness • Implicit negative stereotypes can negatively influence performance • Chasteen et al. (2002) study • Implicit stereotyping influences the way communicate with older adults • Patronizing speech • Includes slow speech, simple vocabulary, careful enunciation, a demeaning emotional tone, and superficial conversation

10. Activation of Stereotypes in Older and Younger Adults • Chasteen et al. (2002) paper • Explicit vs. implicit tasks • Implicit task: Prime (young, old or XXXX) & target stimuli in a lexical decision task (word vs. non-word) at short onset synchrony (300 ms for automatic processing & 2000 ms for controlled processing). • Fiske et al. (2002): People’s attitudes of groups derived from perception of warmth and competence. • Implicit stereotyping vs. implicit prejudice

11. Four Questions Raised by Chasteen • Do younger and older adults hold the same stereotypes about the young and the old? • Are people more positive about their own age group? • Who is prejudiced against whom? • Do people correct their automatic response when they have a chance to do so?

16. Main Conclusions • Automatic stereotyping seems present, but unclear about automatic prejudice. • Young and older adults demonstrate strong stereotype activation for stereotypes for elderly, but relatively weak activation for young stereotypes. Better defined stereotypes of the old? • Prejudice: Faster responses to positive traits in both groups. • Automatic ageism?

17. Stereotype Threat • An evoked fear of being judged in accordance with a negative stereotype about a group to which you belong • Do negative stereotypes influence the cogitative functioning of older adults?

18. What is the Impact of Stereotype Threat on Memory Performance? • Study by Hess et al. (2003) on stereotype threat associated with negative cultural beliefs about the impact of aging on memory. • Threat may affect performance by raising anxiety or lowering motivation. • Threat is hypothesized to affect most those who strongly identify with the stereotyped domain.

19. Stereotype Threat (Hess et al., 2003) • Informed young and older adults about research findings on memory (either positive or negative) & then given a memory test to “explore these findings”. • Prime/trait term test between 2 tests: Had to categorize trait as good or bad.

21. Conclusions • Conditions maximizing threat for older adults yielded a lower performance than for non-exposed older adults & younger adults. • The threat affected older adults the more they valued their memory. • Memory covaried with the strength of activations of the negative stereotype. • Stereotype threat also influenced strategy use.

22. What If We Primed Positive Stereotypes about Memory? • Stein, Blanchard-Fields and Hertzog (2002) made similar conclusions as Hess on the impact of negative stereotype threat although found the need to be unaware of a prime. • They found though that positive stereotypes did not increase memory performance in older adults.

23. Multidimensionality of Personal Control • Personal control is the degree to which one believes that one’s performance in a situation depends on something that one personally does • One’s sense of control depends on which domain, such as intelligence or health, is being assessed

24. Control Strategies • Brandtstädter proposes that the preservation and stabilization of a positive view of the self and personal development in later life involve three interdependent processes • Assimilative strategies • Used when one must prevent losses important to self-esteem • Accommodative strategies • Involve readjusting one’s goals and aspirations • Immunizing mechanisms • Alter the effects of self-discrepant information

25. Control Strategies • Heckhausen and Schulz view control-related strategies in terms of primary and secondary control • Primary control helps change the environment to match one’s goals • It involves bringing the environment into line with one’s desires and goals • Secondary control reappraises the environment in light of one’s decline in functioning • The individual turns inward toward the self and assesses the situation

26. Control Strategies • Secondary control reappraises the environment in light of one’s decline in functioning • The individual turns inward toward the self and assesses the situation • Primary control is said to have functional primacy over secondary control • Primary control has more adaptive value to the individual • Secondary control simply minimizes losses or expands levels of primary control

27. Some Criticisms Regarding Primary Control • Cross-cultural perspectives challenge the notion of primacy and primary control. • In collectivists societies, the emphasis is not on individualistic strategies such as those found in primary control, but to establish interdependence with others, to be connected to them, and bound to a large social institution.

28. Collaborative Cognition • Occurs when two or more people work together to solve a cognitive task • Collaborating with others in recollection helps facilitate memory in older adults • But there can also be collaborative inhibition of memory (Ross et al., 2004).

29. Social Context and Memory • Importantly, the social context can serve a facilitative function in older adults’ memory performance • Thus, it is important not to limit our explanations of social cognitive change simply to cognitive processing variables, but to also include social factors

30. Social Decision-Making & Executive Function • MacPherson et al. (2002) • DL regions: executive functions & working memory • VM: Limbic system – processing of emotions and regulation of social behaviour. • DL regions show early change in aging vs. VM regions.

32. Social Decision-Making vs. Executive Function • DL tasks: Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, Self-Ordered Pointing Task, & Delayed Response Task • VM Tasks: Gambling Task, Faux Pas Task, & Emotion Identification Task. • General conclusion: Age effects were found on DL tasks, but not on VM-dependent tasks. • Perception of negative emotions did appear to change slightly, but were correlated mostly with memory measures.

33. Levels of Analysis and Personality Research • Dispositional traits • Consists of aspects of personality that are consistent across different contexts and can be compared across a group along a continuum representing high and low degrees of the characteristics. • Personal concerns • Life narrative

34. The Case for Stability: The Five-Factor Model • Consists of five independent dimensions of personality • Neuroticism • Extraversion • Openness to experience • Agreeableness • Conscientiousness

35. Neuroticism • Has six facets: • Anxiety • Hostility • Self-consciousness • Depression • Impulsiveness • Vulnerability

36. Extraversion • Has six facets in two groups: • Interpersonal traits • Warmth • Gregariousness • Assertiveness • Temperamental traits • Activity • Excitement seeking • Positive emotions

37. Openness to Experience • Has six areas: • Fantasy • Aesthetics • Action • Ideas • Values • Occupational choice

38. Agreeableness • Agreeable people are not: • Skeptical • Mistrustful • Callous • Unsympathetic • Stubborn • Rude • Skillful manipulators • Aggressive go-getters

39. Conscientiousness • Conscientious people are: • Hardworking • Ambitious • Energetic • Scrupulous • Persevering • Desirous to make something of themselves

40. What is the Evidence for Trait Stability? • Using the GZTS (n=114), Costa and McCrae found: • Over a 12-year period, 10 personality traits measured by GZTS remained stable. • However Costa & McCrae now say traits are not immutable but fairly stable. • Martin et al. (2003) found equivalent results. However, in the very old, suspiciousness and sensitivity increased.

41. Costa & McCrae Article (2006) • Cross-cultural evidence does suggest modest decreases in neuroticism, extraversion, and openness, and increases in agreeableness and conscientiousness as people age (Terracciano et al., 2005) • Openness increases in young adulthood then decreases. • Changes are more pronounced in early adulthood. • Similar developmental patterns across sexes.

42. Terracciano, McCrae, Brant, & Costa (2005). Hierarchical Linear Modeling Analyses of the NEO-PI-R Scales in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. Psychology and Aging, 20 (3), 493-506.

43. Terracciano, McCrae, Brant, & Costa (2005). Hierarchical Linear Modeling Analyses of the NEO-PI-R Scales in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. Psychology and Aging, 20 (3), 493-506.

44. Terracciano, McCrae, Brant, & Costa (2005). Hierarchical Linear Modeling Analyses of the NEO-PI-R Scales in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. Psychology and Aging, 20 (3), 493-506.

45. Terracciano, McCrae, Brant, & Costa (2005). Hierarchical Linear Modeling Analyses of the NEO-PI-R Scales in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. Psychology and Aging, 20 (3), 493-506.

46. Terracciano, McCrae, Brant, & Costa (2005). Hierarchical Linear Modeling Analyses of the NEO-PI-R Scales in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. Psychology and Aging, 20 (3), 493-506.

47. Costa & McCrae Article (2006) • Subdivision of extraversion into social vitality and social dominance. • Roberts et al. (2006) found increase in dominance from adolescence to age 40; McCrae & Costa saw assertiveness decrease in adults compared to college students

48. Additional Studies of Dispositional Traits • Other studies have shown increasing evidence for personality changes as we grow older. 1. Certain traits, (self-confidence, cognitive development, outgoingness, and dependability) show some changes in the 30 to 40 year period 2. Neuroticism may increase according to Small, but this finding is in opposition to Costa & McCrae’s. 3. In a large online study (n=130,000), Srivastasa et al. (2003) found that none of the Big Five traits remained stable after age 30

49. The Berkeley Studies • Participants were followed for 30 years between ages 40 to 70. Gender differences were identified • For women • Lifestyle in young adulthood was best predictor of life satisfaction in old age • For men • Personality was the better predictor of life satisfaction in old age

50. Women’s Personality Development During Adulthood • Two categories of women were studied with the following personality differences • Those who followed the social clock • Withdrawal from social live • Suppression of impulse and spontaneity • Negative self-image • Decreased feelings of competence • 20% were divorced between ages of 28 and 30