Participants

This new try made up 192 people off six a long time (19–30, 30–39, 40–44, 50–59, 60–69, and you will 70–79 ages), for each and every stratified by intercourse. It obtained ˆtwenty-five (whenever $35) for two 2-hr instructions to pay the costs. An average of, members have been well educated having 15.eight numerous years of training. Complete, they stated higher levels of lifestyle fulfillment (Meters = step 3.68; measured by an individual goods that have a scale anywhere between step one [very unhappy] so you’re able to 5 [most found]).

Age group differences were found for years spent with education, F(5,181) = 4.51, p < .01, with the group of 30–39 years old having received the highest educational level (M = years) and the group of 50–59 years old having the lowest level (M = years). The analysis of a dichotomized variable “partnership” (yes vs. no, each 50% of the sample) revealed no age differences, ? 2 (5, N = 190) = 4.15, ns, suggesting that, in principle, the members of all age groups did not differ in the risk of being exposed to partnership conflicts.

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As the age-neutral task, we used the suicide task, a task that had been used in several past studies from the Berlin group (i.e., “Somebody receives a phone call from a good friend. The friend says that she or he cannot go on anymore and that she or he has decided to commit suicide. What could one/the person consider and do?”). In addition, we formulated a vignette about marital conflict as a task that is particularly relevant to younger adults (“Somebody has a serious conflict in her or his partnership. What could one/the person consider and do?”). Finally, to assess wisdom-related knowledge about marital conflict under more natural conditions, we presented films of couples as they discussed a mutual Salt Lake City Utah best hookup apps conflict in their marriage. Thus, the films presented real people’s real problems in context-rich ways (i.e., the spouses engaged in an authentic conflict conversation and expressed their thoughts and emotions on various verbal and nonverbal channels). Thirty-four couples were initially invited to our laboratory and films-taped as they had a conflict conversation (interview procedures were modeled after those that had been developed by Levenson and Gottman; Gottman Levenson, 1992; Levenson Gottman, 1983). At the end of a multiple-step validation procedure, three films were selected for which there was agreement that the conversations were highly authentic, the discussed conflicts were serious and emotionally burdensome for the couples, and the spouses expressed a wide range of negative emotions. Not surprisingly, the marital conflict films elicited greater negative emotional reactions than the hypothetical vignette-based conflict task, F(1,175) = 5.91; p = .016; ?_p 2 = .03. At a baseline period and after each wisdom task, negative emotional reactions were assessed by asking participants to indicate how intensely they currently feel each of 22 negative emotions. Negative emotional reactivity was calculated as the mean across the 22 negative emotion adjectives (negative emotion scale: ?_{video clips} = .79; ?_vignette = .85). There were no age differences in negative emotional reactivity (M_baseline = 0.46, SD = 0.58; M_vignette = 0.55, SD = 1.23; M_video = 0.99, SD = 0.72). Each of the finally selected three films was approximately 5min long, showed the spouses’ front view in a split screen, and dealt with a different topic: hierarchy between the spouses and child-rearing problems, loyalty between the spouses and relationship with parents-in-law, and intimacy and amount of time spend together. The spouses were between 30 and 35 years old and had been living together since several years.

Years advantages away from skills opportunities.

Participants of a pilot study (young: N = 32, M = 23.6, range = 18–30 years; old: N = 32, M = 69.3, range = 61–80 years) indicated for each vignette how often the described problem (suicide or marital conflict) occurs in young adulthood and old age using a response scale from 1 (very rarely) to 5 (very often). A repeated measures ANOVA with target age (young vs. old) and problem domain (suicide vs. marital conflict) as within-subject factors and participants’ age (young vs. old) as between-subject factor revealed a significant main effect of problem domain, F(1,62) = , p = .002, as well as a significant interaction effect between problem domain and target age, F(1,62) = , p < .001. As expected, suicide was rated to occur less frequently (M = 2.20; SD = 0.75) than marital conflict (M = 2.57; SD = 0.65). Follow-up t-tests of the interaction effect suggested that suicide was considered to occur similarly infrequently in young adulthood and old age, t(63) = 1.14, ns, but marital conflict was considered to be more typical in young adulthood than in old age (M_young = 3.39, SD = 1.05; M_elderly = 1.75, SD = .76, t(63) = , p < .001). There were no significant main or interaction effects of participants' age.