Gisela Labouvie-Vief - US grants

Friendships have been shown to be an important resource for older persons with respect both to social support and mental health. Research on friendship in old age has been cross-sectional and the sources of these friends has not been examined. Using a life-course perspective, this research is designed to contribute to knowledge about friendships and acquaintanceships from adolescence to old age, and to gauge the effects of fiftieth high school reunions on the friendship networks of the now chronologically old class members. The 541 members of the 1934 graduation class of a high school located in a then predominantly middle-class suburb will be the research population. The research will be conducted in conjunction with their 50th high school class reunion, thereby greatly expediting the process of locating respondents. As of this writing, 308 members (57 per cent) of the class have been located (not including the 76 who are known to have died) and these persons will serve as the respondents for the research. In addition, information about all class members' participation in high school is available in the high school annual. Each member located will be asked to complete a questionnaire approximately 10 months after the reunion in which strength of ties both in high school and at the present time with each classmate are identified. These data will be used to determine the extent to which high school classmates are part of one another's personal networks and their importance in old age. In addition, respondents will be asked questions about their current friendships and social support networks in order to assess the significance of long-term relationships in them. One year after the initial collection of data, the class members will be contacted again and asked to complete a questionnaire. This follow-up questionnaire is intended to discover whether high school reunions in old age promote the renewal of adolescent relationships which have been lost in the intervening years and whether any effects discovered affect only those who attended the reunion or also affect those who only had access to the addresses of classmates.

There has been a surge of recent interest in adaptive and progressive aspects of adult and later life cognitive development, but no research has been aimed, as yet at examining various components of the resulting conceptual and empirical framework within a single research project. Nor has there been any effort at attempting to disentangle the relative contributions of age/maturation and time/cohort change effects. This study aims to test, within an integrated, sequential design, the hypothesis that there are two distinct components of cognitive-emotional maturity. The first is primarily concerned with reflective thinking and cognitive complexity, while the second is primarily related to social maturity and flexibility of defense. These two components are also hypothesized to be a function of different environmental antecedents, the first being mediated primarily by environmental complexity, the second by family relationships promoting security. Delineating and defining these different components of cognitive-emotional maturity and their course through adulthood will help refine our theoretical and empirical understanding of the nature of healthy, adaptive late life development. The proposed 5-year research project employs a combination of longitudinal and cross-sectional sequences. At time 1, a sample of 432 adults, stratified by age, sex, and age/cohort group, will be obtained. These individuals will be retested at Time 2. In addition, a new independent stratified sample of 216 adults will be obtained at Time 2. The research employs a confirmatory factor analytic method. In separate analyses, the research examines a structural model of the relationship between hypothesized dimensions of cognitive-emotional maturity, reflective cognition and social maturity. First, the relationship between these dimensions and more traditional dimensions of intellectual functioning (crystallized and fluid intelligence) will be examined; second a model about different environmental determinants (organizational/control and relationship) of the two cognitive-emotional dimensions will be developed; and third, a structural causal model of the effect of these environmental precursors on adult cognitive-emotional maturity will be tested. Descriptive MANOVAS also will be performed in an attempt to disentangle the effects related to age/maturation vs. those due to time/cohort change, testing/instrumentation, and experimental mortality.

DESCRIPTION (adapted from investigator's abstract): This sequential-longitudinal investigation extends an examination of patterns of cognitive-emotional development across the life span. Research conducted thus far during the initial project period has provided evidence for two psychological components of adult socioemotional development: reflective cognition and maturation of coping. Each is associated with somewhat different predictors/mechanisms: reflective cognition reflects the effects of education and acculturation, while maturity of coping/defense mechanisms reflects a secure relationship history. However the extent to which older individuals performance reflects age or cohort, and the extent to which they reflect flexible affect modulation versus inflexible affect inhibition, remains to be demonstrated. To examine these questions, a longitudinal sample of 330 individuals will be recontracted year 2 of the project. The resulting estimated 300 participants will be distributed over seven age groups from 15 to 93 years, with nearly equal numbers of males and females in each age group. Individuals will respond to cognitive and, socioemotional context and outcome measures. In addition, a subsample (N=150) of the original sample will be selected for an in-depth interview during which measures of physiological reactivity and facial expression of emotion will be interfaced with self-assessments (self-reports) of emotional reactivity. Finally, a new subsample of 154 African-Americans will be matched in age, gender and education to this longitudinal subsample. Analyses will examine the following issues: (a) if age gradients reported so far generalize across time; (b) if changes in reflective cognition and maturity are related to different predictor variables; (c) the degree to which study variables are related to survival; and (d) if the structural models so far established generalizes across time and cultural group; (e) age related differences in affect expression and affect repression/inhibition and (f) if affect repression/inhibition is involved in maintaining a sense of well-being and apparently good coping especially in older individuals.

This longitudinal-sequential study continues to examine the principle of dynamic integration that underlies affect-cognition relations throughout the adult life span and further elaborates it by interfacing relatively macrolevel, psychometric/personological evidence with more micro-level and process-oriented analyses. Rather than defining success in emotion regulation as the maximization of positive and minimization of negative affect, or affect optimization, optimal regulation is characterized as a dynamic coordination of affect optimization with cognitive-affective complexity, or a concern with a complex and objective description of emotion-relevant issues. Deviations from such dynamic integration can occur when processing resources are restricted either as a result of normative cognitive changes related to age, or of socio-emotional restrictions such a poor regulation styles. Under such restrictions, individuals will opt for one of the modes to the exclusion of the other, resulting in less well-regulated behavior. A total of 337 European Americans and African Americans aged 20 to 98 will undergo an extensive battery of measures related to affect, cognition, social context, well-being, and health in Phase 1 of the study. This Phase extends the core longitudinal study and examines the developmental course of the modes, their stability over time, and their antecedents and adaptive outcomes on a relatively macro-analytical level. Phase 2 and 3 add to Phase 1 a more micro-analytical and experimental examination of how individuals organize representations about self and other, and how these representations are affected by exposure to threatening emotions. In Phase 3, finally, 120 individuals from the total population will be selected to participate in an experience sampling study examining variability and covariation of emotions across a relatively short time interval of 1 week. Phase 1 longitudinal analyses using multi-group hierarchical linear modeling will focus on analyzing patterns of change in the regulation modes as well as identifying sources of individual differences in change. For Parts 2 and 3, parameters derived from these analyses will be interfaced with evidence about specific mechanisms gleaned from more micro-level process study and sampling of daily affective experience. Overall, this study will make a significant contribution towards examining linkages between emotion regulation and patterns of psychological and physical aging, as well as identifying social and psychological mechanisms that are involved in individual differences in rates of aging.