Age differences in anger and sadness were explored, focusing on the intensity and frequency of these experiences in everyday life and their implicit associations with the self. Ninety-six young and older adults participated in the Day Reconstruction Method, in which emotional experiences on a typical day were recorded, and in 2 implicit association tests assessing implicit self-concepts for anger and sadness. Older adults experienced anger less frequently and less intensively than young adults, but there were no age differences in sadness. In comparison with their younger counterparts, older adults showed a greater IAT effect in the implicit anger test, suggesting a weaker association between the self and anger, but there were no age differences in the implicit sadness test, suggesting age-invariant associations between the self and sadness. Together these findings suggest multidirectional age differences in negative affect and the usefulness of a discrete emotions approach for research interested in emotional aging.

This study provides evidence for the idea that age differences in wise reasoning about fundamental life issues depend on the relevance of age-normative problems in individuals' own lives. This suggests that any phase of life offers opportunities for the attainment of wisdom-related strengths as long as an individual is willing and able to actively engage in life's ongoing challenges.

Several authors proposed that all elements of Beck's cognitive triad (1976) mediate the associations between inference style as described in the hopelessness model (Abramson, Alloy, & Metalsky, 1989) and depressive symptoms. Results of a 3-wave longitudinal study indicate only a partial mediation model with all elements of the cognitive triad being associated with all inference styles, with depressive symptoms fitting the data best. Controlling for direct and indirect effects, no individual element of the cognitive triad mediates the association between inference styles and depressive symptoms. The partial mediation model is not stable across sex or clinical vs subclinical samples. In general, the data supports the integration of all three elements of the cognitive triad into the hopelessness model.

How does perspective-taking develop over the lifespan? This question has been investigated in two separate research traditions, dealing with theory of mind (ToM) and wisdom, respectively. Operating in almost complete isolation from each other, and using rather different conceptual approaches, these two traditions have produced seemingly contradictory results: While perspective-taking has been consistently found to decline in old age in ToM research, studies on wisdom have mostly found that perspective-taking remains constant or sometimes even increases in later adulthood. This study sought to integrate these two lines of research and clarify the seemingly contradictory patterns of findings by systematically testing for both forms of perspective-taking and their potential cognitive foundations. The results revealed (1) the dissociation in developmental patterns between ToM perspective-taking (declining with age) and wisdom-related perspectivetaking (no decline with age) also held -documented here for the first time -in one and the same sample of younger versus older adults; (2) this dissociation was of limited generality: It did not (or only partly) hold once the material of the two types of tasks was more closely matched; and (3) the divergent developmental patterns of ToM perspective-taking versus wisdom-related perspective-taking could be accounted for to some degree by the fact that only TOM perspective-taking was related to developmental changes in fluid intelligence.

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