The personal experience of aging, the resources relevant to it, and the consequences for subjective well-being were investigated in a sample of 4034 Germans aged 40 to 85. The data revealed 3 dimensions of aging experiences as particularly relevant: (a) physical decline, (b) continuous growth, and (c) social loss. Not only being younger but also having better subjective health, higher income, less loneliness, higher education, and greater hope were negatively associated with physical decline and social loss and positively associated with continuous growth. The number of children participants had played no role. All three dimensions of the aging experience were also found to be related to both positive and negative affect and, with the exception of physical decline, to life satisfaction.

Reserve capacity of the elderly in aging-sensitive tests of fluid intelligence : replication and extension first published in:

Historically, ageing processes have often been perceived as growing constraints to a good life, but proposals for a reorganization of positive meanings also date back at least to Roman times. In order to study agerelated reorganization of meaning, self-descriptive statements of 300 young and 300 elderly adults were collected with a sentence completion test. A coding scheme was used to identify age-specific meaning patterns.In contrast to young adults, elderly people completed problem-and future-oriented sentence stems significantly more often by referring to negative aspects of their own ageing process. Nevertheless, their answers to self-referent sentence stems showed that they used significantly more positive and fewer negative or ambivalent statements about self and life. The analysis of the overall patterns of cognitions in both age groups suggested that, within the existential constraints of old age, positive meaning is created by elderly people through various cognitive-affective strategies. For instance, instead of maintaining high expectations for life realization and self-development, the elderly change their standards, becoming more self-accepting and value more highly what is already given and still available. Conclusions are drawn about life-span development and modifiability of meaning.

Elderly adults (N = 116; average age -73 years) were randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups varying in the amount of training and testing on fluid intelligence tests. They were compared before and after treatment on self-efficacy and utility beliefs for intelligence tests and everyday competence. Although both ability training and extended retest practice resulted in significant gains in objective test performance (Baltes, Kliegl, & Dittmann-Kohli, 1988), only ability training resulted in positive changes in self-efficacy. However, these changes were restricted to testrelated self-efficacy. Training had no impact on perceived utility or on everyday self-efficacy beliefs. Implications of the results are discussed with regard to interventions to increase intellectual self-efficacy in elderly persons.A LARGE body of work has demonstrated that there is plasticity in cognitive functioning in later life (Baltes, Kliegl, & Dittmann-Kohli, 1988; Baltes & Lindenberger, 1988; Schaie & Willis, 1986; Willis, 1988). These training studies were conducted largely to examine to what extent cognitive performance could be modified in later life, with particular attention to those cognitive abilities (such as fluid intelligence, memory, and spatial abilities) which had shown the greatest aging-related decrements in longitudinal and cross-sectional studies (Schaie, 1983). In most studies, however, the impact of training on subjective dimensions such as self-efficacy for cognitive tasks or the perceived utility of acquiring new skills has not been investigated. Because subjective assessments of efficacy and utility affect motivation, persistence, affect, and choice of tasks (Bandura, 1989), training effects are unlikely to show maintenance over time or generalizability across tasks unless they are accompanied by changes in self-conceptions that foster effective use of the newly acquired skills (Elliott & Lachman, 1988). Thus, it is desirable that cognitive training leads not only to increases in performance but also to commensurate changes in self-conceptions about the ability to solve intellectual tasks as well as their subjective value. The present study was conducted to examine whether elderly adults would change their self-efficacy beliefs and perceived utility for intellectual tasks as a function of cognitive training or testing experiences involving tests of intelligence. METHODSubjects. -One hundred and sixteen (81 female and 35 male) older adults (average age: 73 years; range 63-89 years) from Berlin participated in the study. Health, compared to others similar in age, was rated on a 5-point scale (1 = very bad, 5 = very good), with a mean of 3.8 (SD = .6). Average educational level was 12 years (SD = 3.0), about two years above average for this cohort (Bundesminister fuer Bildung und Wissenschaft, 1988/89).Measures. -Information about the intelligence test battery can be found in earlier publications (Baltes & Willis, 1982; Baltes et al., 1988). Self-efficacy and perceived utility were rated for all subtests i...

Cognitive training research has shown that many older adults have a substantial reserve capacity in fluid intelligence. Little is known, however, about the locus of plasticity. Two studies were conducted to examine whether training gains in fluid abilities are critically dependent on experimenter-guided training and/or whether older adults can achieve similar improvements by themselves on the basis of cognitive skills already available in their repertoire. Several comparisons were made: (a) between test performances after trainer-guided training in ability-specific cognitive skills and after self-guided retest practice (without feedback), (b) between performances under speeded and power conditions of assessment, (c) between performances on easy and difficult items, and (d) between the relative numbers of correct and wrong answers. Results suggest that a large share of the training improvement shown by the elderly can plausibly be explained as the result of the activation and practice of cognitive skills already available in their repertoire. The results also have implications for educational practice, pointing to the appropriateness of strategies of self-directed learning for many elderly adults.