Do older adults change their eyewitness reports when re-questioned?

Increasing disclosures of older adult maltreatment: a review of best practices for interviewing older adult eyewitnesses and victims

The current article provides a contemporary review of the best practices for interviewing older adults about crimes they witnessed or experienced. Specifically, we provide a detailed overview of how investigators can use a range of interviewing adaptations and procedures to acquire detailed and accurate maltreatment disclosures from older adults. In addition to discussing well-established investigative interviewing practices (e.g. rapport building, free-recall, cognitive instructions and prompts), this article also summarizes more recent literature on the benefits of multidisciplinary investigations, use of assistive technology and interview accommodations, along with effective practices for working with minority and marginalized older adults. Lastly, several research, professional and policy recommendations are provided for supporting older adults during investigative interviews.

Understanding Older Adults' Memory Distortion in the Light of Stereotype Threat

Numerous studies have documented the detrimental impact of age-based stereotype threat (ABST) on older adults' cognitive performance and especially on veridical memory. However, far fewer studies have investigated the impact of ABST on older adults' memory distortion. Here, we review the subset of research examining memory distortion and provide evidence for the role of stereotype threat as a powerful socio-emotional factor that impacts age-related susceptibility to memory distortion. In this review we define memory distortion as errors in memory that are associated with gist-based errors or source misattributions. Whereas, some of the reviewed experiments support the conclusion that ABST should be considered in the context of age-related differences in memory distortion, others reported little or no impact of stereotype threat. These discrepancies suggest that the role of ABST, and socio-emotional processes generally, in age-related changes in memory distortion are less clear. In this review, we argue that ABST does play an important role in age-related changes in memory distortion. We present evidence suggesting that discrepancies in the reviewed literature may be reconciled when evaluated in the context of the leading theories about stereotype threat: the Executive Resource Depletion hypothesis and the Regulatory Focus theory. We also discuss how differences in methodology and participant characteristics can account for a priori contradictory results in the literature. Finally, we propose some recommendations for researchers and practitioners when assessing memory in older adults.

The Applied Implications of Age-Based Stereotype Threat for Older Adults

Stereotype threat occurs when people feel concerned about the possibility of confirming, or being negatively judged by, a negative stereotype. This review highlights the applied implications of this phenomenon for older adults In clinical settings, older adults often feel that their physicians have negative expectations about their abilities because of their age. These feelings of age-based stereotype threat can increase older adults' subjective cognitive complaints and impair their performance on mental status examinations. Other research has shown that stereotype threat also adversely affects older adults' physical performance, motor learning, and driving performance. In workplace settings, older adults who experience stereotype threat also report lower job satisfaction, poorer work-related mental health, and greater intentions to resign or retire. Overall, this review provides evidence that the situational phenomenon of stereotype threat can affect older adults' performance in a variety of applied settings, and this can contribute to age differences in performance.

Memory performance predicts interrogative suggestibility better than global cognition in older adults with subjective cognitive complaints

The present study aims to investigate to which extent global cognition and verbal memory can estimate interrogative suggestibility (IS) in elderly people with subjective cognitive complaints (SCCs). We used the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale (GSS 2) subscales (i.e., Yield 1, Yield 2 and Shift) as measures of IS. Data from a sample of consecutive patients (N = 94) who referred to neuropsychology units for the first time were collected. Our results showed that verbal memory is a better predictor of IS than global cognition. Moreover, memory impairment led to significantly higher IS independently of global cognitive status. These findings suggest that the assessment of verbal memory allows to estimate individual levels of IS better than global cognition, even in elders with objective cognitive deficits. Implications for forensic assessment of senior witnesses are discussed.

Positive and Detached Reappraisal of Threatening Music in Younger and Older Adults

Past empirical studies have suggested that older adults preferentially use gaze-based mood regulation to lessen their negative experiences while watching an emotional scene. This preference for a low cognitively demanding regulatory strategy leaves open the question of whether the effortful processing of a more cognitively demanding reappraisal task is really spared from the general age-related decline. Because it does not allow perceptual attention to be redirected away from the emotional source, music provides an ideal way to address this question. The goal of our study was to examine the affective, behavioral, physiological, and cognitive outcomes of positive and detached reappraisal in response to negative musical emotion in younger and older adults. Participants first simply listened to a series of threatening musical excerpts and were then instructed to either positively reappraise or to detach themselves from the emotion elicited by music. Findings showed that, when instructed to simply listen to threatening music, older adults reported a more positive feeling associated with a smaller SCL in comparison with their younger counterparts. When implementing positive and detached reappraisal, participants showed more positive and more aroused emotional experiences, whatever the age group. We also found that the instruction to intentionally reappraise negative emotions results in a lesser cognitive cost for older adults in comparison with younger adults. Taken together, these data suggest that, compared to younger adults, older adults engage in spontaneous downregulation of negative affect and successfully implement downregulation instructions. This extends previous findings and brings compelling evidence that, even when auditory attention cannot be redirected away from the emotional source, older adults are still more effective at regulating emotions. Taking into account the age-associated decline in executive functioning, our results suggest that the working memory task could have distracted older adults from the reminiscences of the threat-evoking music, thus resulting in an emotional downregulation. Hence, even if they were instructed to implement reappraisal strategies, older adults might prefer distraction over engagement in reappraisal. This is congruent with the idea that, although getting older, people are more likely to be distracted from a negative source of emotion to maintain their well-being.

Competing cues: Older adults rely on knowledge in the face of fluency

Consumers regularly encounter repeated false claims in political and marketing campaigns, but very little empirical work addresses their impact among older adults. Repeated statements feel easier to process, and thus more truthful, than new ones (i.e., illusory truth). When judging truth, older adults' accumulated general knowledge may offset this perception of fluency. In two experiments, participants read statements that contradicted information stored in memory; a post-experimental knowledge check confirmed what individual participants knew. Unlike young adults, older adults exhibited illusory truth only when they lacked knowledge about claims. This interaction between knowledge and fluency extends dual-process theories of aging. (PsycINFO Database Record