Older people and death-thought accessibility: The association between death and older people in memory.

This work aimed to conceptually replicate and extend Martens, Greenberg, Schimel, and Landau's findings about older people as threatening future self. We conducted two studies using a lexical decision task to measure death-thought accessibility. Results showed that older people primes lead to stronger facilitation of death-related compared, with negative words. Such a facilitation is not observed with young people primes (Study 1). Moreover, the automatic association between the representation of older people and death was stronger when participants and older people primes were of the same sex (Study 2). Implications of these findings with respect to ageism are discussed.

Ageism and COVID-19: what does our society's response say about us?

The goal of this commentary is to highlight the ageism that has emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 20 international researchers in the field of ageing have contributed to this document. This commentary discusses how older people are misrepresented and undervalued in the current public discourse surrounding the pandemic. It points to issues in documenting the deaths of older adults, the lack of preparation for such a crisis in long-term care homes, how some 'protective' policies can be considered patronising and how the initial perception of the public was that the virus was really an older adult problem. This commentary also calls attention to important intergenerational solidarity that has occurred during this crisis to ensure support and social-inclusion of older adults, even at a distance. Our hope is that with this commentary we can contribute to the discourse on older adults during this pandemic and diminish the ageist attitudes that have circulated.

"Old" Does Not Always Mean "Incompetent": The Implication of Respect in the Perception of Older People Subtypes.

Building on the Stereotype Content Model, the present work examined the heterogeneity of the stereotypes about older people. We aimed to broaden the range of perceived predictors of competence in older people and included respect in addition to status. Seventeen subtypes were selected in a pilot study (n = 77). The main study was conducted on a French sample (n = 212) that took part in a self-reported survey. Cluster analysis showed that specific older people subtypes appear in three combinations of warmth and competence. Correlation and regression analyses showed that competition negatively predicts warmth, and that status positively predicts competence. In a substantial number of target groups, respect played a more important role than status in the perception of group competence. To sum up, this study suggests that the perceived competence of older people is not only related to perceived socio-economic status but also to the amount of respect they receive.

Animalistic dehumanization of older people by younger ones: Variations of humanness perceptions as a function of a target's age.

The present work investigated associations of older people with humanness. Focusing on complementary approaches (attribute-based, metaphor-based, and target-based), 4 studies tested the hypothesis that older people are the targets of animalistic dehumanization. Using an emotional attribution task, Study 1 (N = 112) explored infrahumanization and shows that young participants attributed more uniquely human emotions to young people than to older ones. No such effect occurred with regards to nonuniquely human emotions. Results of Study 2 (N = 62) replicated this result using a lexical-decision task. Using the metaphor-based approach, Study 3 (N = 99) confirmed that older people's dehumanization is restricted to its animalistic form and does not extend to the mechanistic one. Finally, in Study 4 (N = 167), we used a target-based approach and showed that characteristics initially attributed to older people are perceived as denoting lesser humanness than when these same characteristics are associated with younger people. Results of the 4 studies provide evidence for an animalistic form of dehumanization of older people by younger ones. Limits, implications, and future research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Judgment of riskiness: impact of personality, naive theories and heuristic thinking among female students.

Three different studies were conducted to examine the impact of heuristic reasoning in the perception of health-related events: lifetime risk of breast cancer (Study 1, n = 468), subjective life expectancy (Study 2, n = 449), and subjective age of onset of menopause (Study 3, n = 448). In each study, three experimental conditions were set up: control, anchoring heuristic and availability heuristic. Analyses of Covariance controlling for optimism, depressive mood, Locus of Control, hypochondriac tendencies and subjective health, indicated significant effect of experimental conditions on perceived breast-cancer risk (p = 0.000), subjective life expectancy (p = 0.000) and subjective onset of menopause (p = 0.000). Indeed, all findings revealed that availability and anchoring heuristics were being used to estimate personal health-related events. The results revealed that some covariates, hypochondriac tendencies in Study 1, optimism, depressive mood and subjective health in Study 2 and internal locus of control in Study 3 had significant impact on judgment of riskiness.