Within-person changes in salivary testosterone and physical characteristics of puberty predict boys' daily affect.

Recent investigations highlighted the role of within-person pubertal changes for adolescents' behavior. Yet, little is known about effects on adolescents' daily affect, particularly regarding the hormonal changes underlying physical changes during puberty. In a study with 148 boys aged 10 to 20years, we tested whether within-person physical and hormonal changes over eight months predicted everyday affect fluctuations, measured with experience sampling. As expected, greater within-person changes in testosterone (but not in dehydroepiandrosterone) were associated with higher affect fluctuations in daily life. Additionally, greater physical changes predicted higher affect fluctuations for individuals in the beginning of puberty. The findings demonstrate the relevance of physical and hormonal changes in boys' affective (in)stability.

Daily affect across adulthood and into old age: Recent advances from ambulatory research.

Ambulatory research - such as daily-diary or experience sampling studies - captures experiences as they naturally occur in people's daily lives. It shows that older adults' daily affective experiences, on average, are more positive and more stable, compared to younger age groups. Recent advances in ambulatory research contribute a more refined understanding beyond the valence dimension, demonstrating that the arousal of affective experiences matters as well, and that discrete emotions, such as sadness, may be differently prevalent and adaptive in different phases of adulthood. Another recent contribution is evidence that cross-sectional adult age differences in daily affect may not map onto within-person change over time. While longitudinal improvement in daily affect is observed across young and into early middle adulthood, stability and decline in affective well-being are typical throughout late middle and older adulthood, respectively. Likewise, empirical support for the claim that emotion regulation is a prime reason for age differences in daily affect remains mixed. Older as compared to younger adults are indeed more motivated to feel better, and more confident that their affect-regulation is successful. However, there is no consistent support that older adults' daily affect-regulation strategies, effectiveness, or flexibility differ from younger age groups.

Everyday empathic accuracy in younger and older couples: do you need to see your partner to know his or her feelings?

On average, older adults are less accurate than younger adults at recognizing emotions from faces or voices. We challenge the view that such differences in emotion-recognition tasks reflect differences in empathic accuracy (the ability to infer other people's feelings): Empathic accuracy relies not only on sensory cues (e.g., emotional expressions) but also on knowledge about the target person. Using smartphone-based measures, we assessed empathic accuracy in younger and older couples' daily lives and found that younger adults' empathic accuracy was higher than older adults' empathic accuracy when their partners were visibly present. During the partners' absence, however, when judgments relied exclusively on knowledge of those partners, no age differences emerged, and performance in both age groups was still more accurate than chance. We conclude that across adulthood, sensory information and knowledge differentially support empathic accuracy. Laboratory emotion-recognition tasks may therefore underestimate older adults' empathic competencies.

Emotion regulation strategies and psychological health across cultures.

Emotion regulation is important for psychological health and can be achieved by implementing various strategies. How one regulates emotions is critical for maximizing psychological health. Few studies, however, tested the psychological correlates of different emotion regulation strategies across multiple cultures. In a preregistered cross-cultural study (N = 3,960, 19 countries), conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, we assessed associations between the use of seven emotion regulation strategies (situation selection, distraction, rumination, cognitive reappraisal, acceptance, expressive suppression, and emotional support seeking) and four indices of psychological health (life satisfaction, depressive symptoms, perceived stress, and loneliness). Model comparisons based on Bayesian information criteria provided support for cultural differences in 36% of associations, with very strong support for differences in 18% of associations. Strategies that were linked to worse psychological health in individualist countries (e.g., rumination, expressive suppression) were unrelated or linked to better psychological health in collectivist countries. Cultural differences in associations with psychological health were most prominent for expressive suppression and rumination and also found for distraction and acceptance. In addition, we found evidence for cultural similarities in 46% of associations between strategies and psychological health, but none of this evidence was very strong. Cultural similarities were most prominent in associations of psychological health with emotional support seeking. These findings highlight the importance of considering the cultural context to understand how individuals from diverse backgrounds manage unpleasant emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

With a little help from my spouse: does spousal collaboration compensate for the effects of cognitive aging?

BACKGROUND: Collaborating with another person may help people compensate for aging-related losses in memory performance. However, collaborating in itself is effortful and draws upon individual cognitive resources. One factor that can facilitate collaboration, and decrease its resource requirements, is familiarity between interaction partners. Such facilitation should be particularly important when cognitive-mechanic resources are low. OBJECTIVE: The current study was conducted to empirically test this theoretical notion. We hypothesized that cognitive aging should amplify the advantage of collaborating with a familiar partner over collaborating with an unfamiliar person. METHODS: We developed an interpersonal cueing task based on the game Taboo©. The task modeled an everyday-life situation in which one person cues another person to retrieve a piece of information from memory. Seventy-six younger adults (20-33 years) and 80 older adults (63-79 years) worked on this task once with their spouse and once with an unfamiliar cross-sex partner from the same age group. Collaborative performance was operationalized as the number of cue words needed until the partner guessed the target, as determined by independent trained coders. Performance in the Digit Symbol Substitution Test was used as an indicator of cognitive aging. RESULTS: Multilevel-modeling analyses revealed that collaborating spouses outperformed collaborators who had not known each other before. This effect was comparable for both age groups but larger in persons with lower Digit Symbol scores. While participants with lower Digit Symbol scores generally performed worse in the collaborative task, they partly made up for this difference when working with the spouse. CONCLUSION: We conclude that spousal collaboration may offer a compensatory strategy to cope with individual aging-related losses.

The 'I know you' and the 'you know me' of mutual goal knowledge in partnerships: differential associations with partnership satisfaction and sense of closeness over time.

Personal goals, that is, ideas of what one wants to maintain, attain, or avoid in the future, are pursued within social contexts and may influence the social systems a person belongs to. Focusing on romantic partnerships as one of the most important social contexts in adulthood, this longitudinal study investigated the role of partners' mutual goal knowledge for partnership development (T1: N=69 couples; T2: N=47). Partners described their own personal goals and the goals they assumed their partners to have. Trained coders rated the overlap between the self-reported and the ascribed goals. Actor-partner interdependence models showed that knowing one's partner's goals was associated with a higher level of partnership satisfaction after about 16 months, controlling for initial partnership satisfaction. Having a partner who knows one's goals, by contrast, predicted greater feelings of closeness to that partner after the same period of time, controlling for initial levels of closeness; and this association could not be attributed to a greater similarity between both partners' goals. Overall, this research shows that both the 'I know you' and the 'You know me' components contribute to positive partnership development, and that their specific implications vary for different facets of partnership quality.

Physicians' Interactions with Peers: Empathic Accuracy during Shift Handovers on Intensive-Care Units.

BACKGROUND: We investigated how accurately physicians judge colleagues' states during shift handovers on intensive-care units, the role of physician characteristics, and how accuracy is related to handover partners' satisfaction. METHODS: Using mobile phones, we assessed momentary judgements during N = 272 shift handovers by 36 physicians of five Swiss clinics. Physicians rated their own and their partner's affective states. We calculated the covariation of the perceiver's judgements of the partner's affect with the partner's self-reported affect and the perceiver's own self-reported affect. We then examined the moderation of these covariations by physicians' roles and experience. RESULTS: Overall, resident physicians were moderately successful in taking their counterparts' perspective: Perceiver's ratings of partner's affect and the latter's self-ratings were significantly related. Associations between perceivers' ratings of their own and their partner's affect were also evident. None of the effects varied as a function of physicians' roles. There was an unexpected effect of job experience; physicians with more experience were more likely to project their own affect into the rating of partner's affect. Physicians' accuracy in judging the partner's tense arousal was related to the partner's satisfaction with the social interaction. This effect may have been mainly driven by instances in which low tension was accurately judged, however.

Hedonic orientation moderates the association between cognitive control and affect reactivity to daily hassles in adolescent boys.

People often seek to regulate their affective reactions when confronted with hassles. Hassle reactivity is lower for people with higher cognitive control, presumably because of better affect regulation. Many adolescents, however, show higher hassle reactivity than children, despite better cognitive control. The present study aims to understand whether motivational differences when seeking to regulate affective experiences moderate the association between cognitive control and hassle reactivity in adolescence. We hypothesized that higher cognitive control is related to lower hassle reactivity only for adolescents with a strong hedonic orientation, that is, for adolescents who seek to maintain or enhance positive or to dampen negative affect. We investigated 149 boys' (age range: 10-20 years) hedonic orientation and affect reactivity toward daily hassles during 2 weeks of experience sampling. Higher cognitive control, assessed with a working memory battery in the laboratory, was associated with stronger hassle reactivity in individuals with low hedonic orientation. The more hedonic-oriented individuals were, the lower was their hassle reactivity, but only in combination with high cognitive control. Our findings illustrate that higher cognitive control is not always related to lower hassle reactivity. Rather, when daily hassles compromise affect balance, hedonic orientation is equally important to understand affect reactivity in adolescent boys. (PsycINFO Database Record

Does being empathic pay off?-Associations between performance-based measures of empathy and social adjustment in younger and older women.

Cognitive empathy (the ability to infer another person's thoughts and feelings) and emotional empathy (the ability to emotionally resonate with another person's feelings) have been associated with social adjustment. Traditionally, these skills are assessed with self-report measures. However, these may not adequately reflect people's actual empathic abilities. There is only little and inconsistent empirical evidence on associations between performance-based empathy and positive social adjustment. In the study presented here, we gathered further evidence for such an association. Using a realistic interaction task in which unfamiliar women were paired into dyads and talked about positive and negative events in their lives, we assessed empathic accuracy (an indicator of cognitive empathy) and emotional congruence (an indicator of emotional empathy). Additionally, we obtained 2 indicators of social adjustment: participants' self-rated satisfaction regarding the communication with their partner in the interaction task, and their self-rated satisfaction with social relationships in general. We furthermore explored the role of potential moderators, which may help to explain discrepant past findings. To test for contextual and interindividual differences, we distinguished between positive and negative emotional valence in the empathy task and investigated 2 adult age groups (102 younger women: 20-31 years; 106 older: 69-80 years). For almost all analyses, only empathic skills for positive (not for negative) affect were predictive of social adjustment, and the associations were comparable for younger and older women. These results underline the role of valence in associations between empathic skills and social adjustment across the life span. (PsycINFO Database Record

Empathic accuracy for happiness in the daily lives of older couples: Fluid cognitive performance predicts pattern accuracy among men.

Correctly identifying other's emotional states is a central cognitive component of empathy. We examined the role of fluid cognitive performance for empathic accuracy for happiness in the daily lives of 86 older couples (mean relationship length = 45 years; mean age = 75 years) on up to 42 occasions over 7 consecutive days. Men performing better on the Digit Symbol test were more accurate in identifying ups and downs of their partner's happiness. A similar association was not found for women. We discuss the potential role of fluid cognitive performance and other individual, partner, and situation characteristics for empathic accuracy. (PsycINFO Database Record

Diurnal coupling between testosterone and cortisol from adolescence to older adulthood.

The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) and hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axes are typically conceptualized as mutually inhibitory systems; however, previous studies have found evidence for positive within-person associations (i.e., coupling) between cortisol and testosterone. One developmental hypothesis is that positive testosterone-cortisol coupling is unique to the adolescent period and that coupling becomes attenuated, or even switches direction, in adulthood. This study used a lifespan sample (N=292, ages 11-88) to test for age-related differences in coupling between cortisol and testosterone in daily life. Participants provided salivary hormone samples at waking, 30min after waking, and during the evening for two days. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to test the within-person and between-person associations between testosterone and cortisol. Within-person associations were further decomposed into associations due to coupled diurnal change versus coupled variability around diurnal change. Results indicated positive associations between cortisol and testosterone at all levels of analysis. Additionally, positive coupling was evident across the lifespan, even in older adults who are no longer expected to reproduce, but further investigation of developmental differences with a larger sample is necessary. Potential mechanisms and functions for positive coupling are discussed.

Nice to meet you--adult age differences in empathic accuracy for strangers.

Empathic accuracy is the ability to correctly identify others' thoughts and feelings. Based on evidence from past laboratory experiments, researchers concluded that this ability decreases throughout adulthood. This conclusion, however, was mostly based on evidence regarding isolated components of the ability to read others' thoughts and feelings (e.g., inferring thoughts or feelings from facial expressions presented without context). In contrast, empathic accuracy involves the integration of a multitude of such inferences from diverse sources of information that are available in everyday interactions (e.g., facial and bodily expressions, prosody, communication content, situational context, etc.). To strengthen empirical evidence on age differences in this integrative ability, we assessed empathic accuracy in dyadic interactions between 102 younger (20-31 years) and 106 older (69-80 years) women, paired in same-age or mixed-age dyads. In these interactions, older women were only less empathically accurate than younger women when judging their interaction partner's negative feelings and when judging thoughts that accompanied experiences of negative affect. In contrast, there were no age differences in empathic accuracy for positive feelings and for thoughts accompanying experiences of positive affect. These results were independent of the age of the interaction partner. The current study thus provides further evidence that age differences in empathic accuracy (a) may be qualified by situational properties, such as valence of inferred content, and (b) can be less pronounced when integration of multiple sources of information is possible than research investigating isolated information channels has thus far suggested.

No smile like another: adult age differences in identifying emotions that accompany smiles.

People smile in various emotional contexts, for example, when they are amused or angry or simply being polite. We investigated whether younger and older adults differ in how well they are able to identify the emotional experiences accompanying smile expressions, and whether the age of the smiling person plays a role in this respect. With this aim, we produced 80 video episodes of three types of smile expressions: positive-affect smiles had been spontaneously displayed by target persons as they were watching amusing film clips and cartoons. Negative-affect smiles had been displayed spontaneously by target persons during an interaction in which they were being unfairly accused. Affectively neutral smiles were posed upon request. Differences in the accompanying emotional experiences were validated by target persons' self-reports. These smile videos served as experimental stimuli in two studies with younger and older adult participants. In Study 1, older participants were less likely to attribute positive emotions to smiles, and more likely to assume that a smile was posed. Furthermore, younger participants were more accurate than older adults at identifying emotional experiences accompanying smiles. In Study 2, both younger and older participants attributed positive emotions more frequently to smiles shown by older as compared to younger target persons, but older participants did so less frequently than younger participants. Again, younger participants were more accurate than older participants in identifying emotional experiences accompanying smiles, but this effect was attenuated for older target persons. Older participants could better identify the emotional state accompanying smiles shown by older than by younger target persons. Taken together, these findings indicate that there is an age-related decline in the ability to decipher the emotional meaning of smiles presented without context, which, however, is attenuated when the smiling person is also an older adult.