This study investigates the relationship between stress, well-being and health in older adults compared to younger adults. This can help inform future interventions aiming to improve health in older adults. Data from 200 undergraduates and 84 older adults were analysed to assess the mediating and moderating role of well-being in the relationship between stress and perceived health in older adults. Age group was also analysed as a moderating factor. Age group significantly moderated the relationship between stress and well-being and stress and health, in both cases the association was weaker in the older adults. Mental well-being was a significant moderator in the relationship between perceived stress and perceived health in older adults, compared to the mediating role in the young. Higher well-being may serve as a protective factor in the link between stress and health in older adults.
Collaborative problem-solving, the mutual engagement of people in a coordinated effort to solve a problem together, plays a critical role in the increasingly complex, linguistically diverse, and interconnected world. In particular, being able to communicate in the same languages provides a critical platform for facilitating problem solving among members of a multilingual team. Little research has explored whether sharing the same spoken languages would boost collaborative problem-solving over and beyond the effects of possible confounding variables such as language proficiency, personality, ethnicity, nationality, and non-verbal intelligence. This study manipulated the sharing of same languages by pairing 118 English-speaking bilingual participants either with someone who shares the same two spoken languages as themselves (English-same pair) or with someone who differs in one language (English-different pair). We explored whether such sharing of the same languages enhances collaborative problem-solving in multilingual pairs. Participants completed the Raven's Matrices individually, as well as an insight problem-solving task (Triangle of Coins task) and a divergent thinking task (Mind-mapping) in pairs. English-same pairs performed better than English-different pairs in the insight problem-solving task but not in the divergent thinking task. English-different pairs collaborated (mean number of turns per minute) and communicated (mean number of utterances) more than English-same pairs in the divergent thinking task, although the effect of pair type on communication was fully mediated by a difference in ethnicity within pairs. More collaboration could have been needed between English-different pairs in the divergent thinking task to achieve comparable performance as English-same pairs, possibly due to the different communication processes experienced by English-different pairs. This study provides insights to the role of sharing spoken languages in enhancing collaborative problem-solving in small multilingual groups.
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