Helpers or halos: examining the evaluative mechanisms underlying selective prosociality.

This research examines the proximate evaluative mechanisms underlying prosocial partner choice-based reciprocity. Across four studies we presented 855 university undergraduates (online for course credit) and 76 4- to 6-year-olds (offline at a university laboratory) with vignettes describing prosocial, social and non-social characters, and asked participants about their person preferences in prosocial, social and general contexts. Adults demonstrated sophisticated appraisals, coordinating between relevant trait and contextual cues to make selections. Adults were particularly attentive to prosocial cues in costly conditions, suggesting that they were using dispositional attributions to make their selections. By contrast, children were largely unable to integrate trait and contextual cues in determining their partner preferences, instead displaying valenced preferences for non-social cues, suggesting the use of affective tagging. Together, these studies demonstrate that the mechanisms underlying prosocial, partner choice-based reciprocity are not early emerging and stable but show considerable development over the lifespan.

Hearing and visual acuity predict cognitive function in adults aged 45-85 years: Findings from the baseline wave of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA).

Associations between sensory status and cognitive performance are now widely reported. However, important open questions remain, including whether the associations are similar across sensory modalities, whether sensory status predicts cognitive performance independent of the cognitive task modality, and whether demographic/health variables moderate these associations. We examined data from a population sample of 30,029 Canadians aged 45-85 (the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging). Hearing was measured as the better ear pure-tone threshold average and vision as the better-eye pinhole-corrected visual acuity. Controlling for age, education, sex, multilingual status, and the other sensory modality, participants with poorer hearing had poorer auditory verbal learning and memory (Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test) and executive function (Stroop, phonemic and semantic oral fluency, mental alternation) and those with poorer vision had poorer executive function. The sensory-cognitive associations were largely independent of the modality of test administration. The association between hearing loss and executive function was greater for persons who were older and those who had more health conditions. The association between vision loss and executive function was greater for persons with less than secondary school education. This study is one of the few that considers hearing and vision jointly, allowing us to compare the independent effects of each sensory modality on cognition and to express those effects as age equivalencies. This work demonstrates that hearing and vision are independently associated with cognitive performance in middle-aged to older aged adults (over-and-above key demographic variables) and independent of test modality. Executive functions appear to be particularly sensitive to associations between sensory function and demographic and health variables. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Delving into the detail: Greater episodic detail in narratives of a critical life event predicts an increase in adolescent depressive symptoms across one year.

Depressed people have reduced ability to recall specific autobiographical memories, yet the role of reduced memory specificity in the development of adolescent depression is unclear. Two reasons are the limited longitudinal studies with this age group and the dominant use of just one measure of memory specificity, the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT; Williams & Broadbent, 1986). In the current one-year longitudinal study, community adolescents (N = 132, M = 16.13 years at Time 1) wrote about a life turning point, and their narratives were coded with respect to the amount of episodic and semantic detail. Participants also completed an adapted version of the Minimal Instructions AMT. Greater episodic detail in young people's turning point narrative was positively associated with depressive symptoms separately at Times 1 and 2, and uniquely predicted increases in depressive symptoms across the year. A non-positive valence of the turning point resolution also positively predicted Time 2 depressive symptoms. In contrast, specificity as assessed by the AMT did not predict such an increase. The results suggest that episodic detail in highly self-relevant narratives may be a sensitive predictor of increases in adolescent depressive symptoms across time. We consider excessive self focus and retrieval style as potential explanations of our findings.