Mark Byrd

Perceptions of sociological and psychological age norms by young, middle-aged, and elderly New Zealanders.

Groups of young, middle-aged, and elderly New Zealand men and women were surveyed as to their opinions concerning the correct age at which to attain various milestones in life (e.g., get married, retire, become a grandparent, or to manifest various personality traits (e.g., be ambitious, have a sense of life satisfaction, be self-concerned). In general, it was found there was considerable agreement as to when a person should attain the milestones of life. There was little agreement about the correct age at which to manifest certain personality traits. This was taken to indicate that society provides its members with a set of expectations, or age norms, about when to achieve life goals. Society does not, however, seem to provide the same standards for how one should feel when achieving these goals. The greatest amount of variability of opinion for when one should manifest these personality traits was seen in the responses of the middle-aged individuals. This was taken to indicate that middle-age is a particularly ill-defined phase of life and subject to much individual interpretation as to what personal characteristics one should use to define middle-age.

Adult Age Differences in the Ability to Write Prose Passages.

Although there has been a great deal of work investigating age‐related decrements in the ability to read and remember prose material, there has been almost no research investigating age differences in the ability to write prose passages. Accordingly, this study asked young and older adults to write short essays on three topics thought to vary in the degree of difficulty needed to complete each task: (1) a descriptive report, (2) a report containing generalized comparisons, and (3) a report containing persuasive arguments. It was thought that the use of these three types of writing assignments would allow for an examination of the manner in which age affects the various linguistic skills necessary to complete writing tasks of varying degrees of difficulty. Analyses of the lexical features of the texts (e.g., passage length, word frequency, etc.) revealed that there were few differences between the texts produced by either age group in any of the writing conditions. Syntactic (e.g., number of correctly prod...

ADULT AGE DIFFERENCES IN THE ABILITY TO READ AND REMEMBER METAPHOR

A series of experiments was conducted to examine adult age differences in the ability to comprehend and retrieve metaphoric information. In Experiment 1, young and old adults read sentences containing common or novel metaphors and were then given a cued‐recall task. There were few differences in the ability of young and old adults to read and remember common metaphors. Age, however, seemed to be associated with the ability to make the linguistic analyses necessary to remember novel metaphors. Experiment 2 investigated the manner in which contextual information aids metaphor comprehension. The presence of appropriate context increased the sentence‐recall levels of both participants. Older adults, however, showed a significantly greater degree of improvement in their ability to make linguistic analyses of novel metaphors.

CROSS-SECTIONAL AGE DIFFERENCES IN THE SELF-CONCEPTIONS OF ADULTS '

105 young, 104 middle-aged, and 96 elderly adults were asked to supply 20 answers to the question “Who am I.” This followed previous research which has shown the responses of children and adolescents display an age-related increase in the number of abstract ideas used to answer this question. Participants of all age groups also used a high number of abstract ideas to characterize themselves, but the nature of these abstractions showed maturation-related variations in openness, competence, and moral integrity. This pattern of results supports Erik Eriksons theory of identity development in adulthood.

The Effects of Age on the Ability to Read and Remember Textual Material Describing How to Perform Skilled Procedures

Two experiments were conducted to determine factors that facilitate or inhibit the ability of young and old adults to read and remember information about how to perform skilled procedures. Few age differences were found in the time taken to read texts that provided an explicit organizationalframework to interpret the material. Further, older adults memory for the central actions of the procedure were equivalent to those of younger individuals. Older adults memory for the subordinate details of the texts was somewhat poorer than that of their younger counterparts. A second study examined age differences in texts that did not provide an organi zational framework with the material. Both reading times and memory levels of the older individuals were negatively affected in this condition. Findings of these studies indicate that the ability to read and remember procedural knowledge is impaired by learning conditions more than by age. Suggestions are made about how to write texts to accommodate the needs of older readers.