This two-part study extended the research on multiple stereotypes of elderly adults by examining the perceptions of young, middle-aged, and elderly adults. First, one set of participants engaged in a trait generation task which yielded a trait list for use in the second part of the study. Second, other participants sorted the set of traits into groups representing different types of elderly individuals. Trait groupings were analyzed with hierarchical cluster analysis. Results supported the hypothesis that older adults have more complex representations of aging than do middle-aged and young ones, and that middle-aged adults have more complex representations than do young ones. For example, middle-aged and elderly adults reported more stereotypes of the elderly than did young adults, and elderly adults reported more stereotypes than did middle-aged adults. Results also showed, as expected, that these differences in complexity exist against a background of general agreement about the nature of aging: Trait lists produced by those in the three age groups were significantly correlated, and the stereotype sets of the three age groups included seven shared stereotypes. Results are interpreted in terms of their support for two alternative explanations of the complexity differences: ingroup/outgroup and developmental.

Forty young, 40 middle-aged, and 40 older adults rated their beliefi about the vocal style that they would use in addressing two older targets-onefitting a negative (Despondent) and one a positive (Golden Aged stereotype. Participants also gave oral messages to the two targets in either a hospital or community context. Supporting a stereotype-sensitive model of the communication and aging process, participants' beli#s and messages revealed a greater tendency to use patronizing talk with the Despondent target than with the Golden Ager. In addition, the extent and type of patronizing talk (overly nurturing or directive) to the targets was afected by the context in which the target was presentedand the age of the communicator. In particular, the number ofdirective/patronizing messages to Golden Ager targets increased sign+cantly in the hospital context. Finally, older participants were less likely to give patronizing messages to all targets than were youngw participants.erceptions of declining abilities with advancing age have been documented in beliefs about memory skills (Heckhausen,

This 2-part study used photograph-age and photograph-stereotype sorting tasks to examine the role of target facial cues in stereotyping of older persons. As predicted, young, middle-aged, and older participants associated photographs of those who looked older and those with a neutral facial expression with fewer positive stereotypes than other photographs. Participants also selected fewer positive stereotypes for photographs of women than of men, except when the photographs showed old-old (80 years and over) men. Participant age affected stereotyping only of the photographs of old-old persons, with older participants selecting fewer positive stereotypes for those photographs than middle-aged and young participants. These results establish the importance of facial cues in the age stereotyping process and suggest age boundaries for positive stereotypes of men and women.

In this study, 125 adults in three age groups (young, middle-aged, and elderly) rated the typicality and approximate age of individuals representing 11 stereotypes of the elderly. Participants indicated their attitudes toward the individuals on a set of bipolar adjective scales. Attitude results conformed to the pattern predicted. Attitudes toward individual stereotypes varied according to the valence of each stereotype rather than participant age. Likewise, age judgments varied with the valence of the stereotype. Participants of all ages chose the older age ranges for the more negative stereotypes and younger age ranges for the positive stereotypes. Finally, elderly participants gave lower typicality ratings to the stereotypes than those in the other two age groups, although those in all age groups ordered the stereotypes similarly in terms of their typicality. Results are discussed in terms of their relationship to the cognitive representations of aging held by those in the three age groups.

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