The International Journal of Aging and Human Development

Youthful ideas about old age are investigated by means of an analysis of children's drawings of young and old people. The age of the artists ranged between ten and a half years and eleven and a half years of age, and each artist drew four pictures (a young woman, an old woman, a young man, and an old man). Analyses consisted of a content analysis of drawings; the calculation of standard scores by means of the Harris-Goodenough Draw-A-Person (DAP) test scoring procedure (in order to effect comparisons of scores within each child's corpus of drawings); and measurement of the height of each drawing. The content analysis suggested a greater degree of stereotyping in boys' pictures of young women and in girls' pictures of old men than in other drawings. Pictures of old people overall were no more stereotyped than were those of young people, though they were more negative in content. Results of the DAP standard score calculation comparisons found consistent differences between children's drawings of old and young people, with pictures of old people attaining lower standard scores than those of young people. Size measurements revealed pictures of old people to be significantly smaller than those of young people. Explanations for these differences are discussed and further investigations recommended involving a wider population of artists and focusing particularly on the size of drawings.

This article reports findings from a study in which the functional exchange of services, emotional (expressive) and tangible (instrumental) between grandparents and adult grandchildren were examined. The reciprocal (equivalent) and nonreciprocal (excessive giving or receiving) exchange of services was measured by the frequency of exchange and perception of potential support between the dyad. Noninstitutionalized Jewish grandparents (118, 65+ years of age) with at least one adult grandchild (18+ years of age) were randomly selected from an apartment house in Miami Beach. The results showed that the majority of grandparent-adult grandchild relationships are not reciprocal in either expressive or instrumental support. Grandparents' perception of reciprocity is that they receive more than they give. Social-work knowledge of functional exchange between this dyad may strengthen the social-support network of the elderly.

This research was aimed at evaluating adult age differences in language comprehension, which has been hypothesized to decline in normal older adults. Three experiments were conducted to investigate the comprehension rate of pairs of related sentences. In Experiment 1, the related material consisted of either terms repeated from the first sentence or terms associatively related to the antecedent. In Experiment 2, the generality of the antecedent term in the sentence pairs varied, as did its typicality. In both experiments, young-old (age 55–69) and old-old (age 70–87) adults read the target sentences in the pairs more slowly than did young adults (age 20–36); age, however, did not interact with the condition. Experiment 3 repeated the conditions of Experiment 2, but, since only one sentence at a time was visible during a trial, the participants had to remember the first sentence while reading the target sentence. Young participants (aged 20–35) showed the same treatment effects as in Experiment 2, but the old (aged 55–86) showed deficits in online comprehension. The results of the three experiments suggest that the speed of comprehension processes required to match related terms in sentence pairs are not impaired with age as long as they do not have to be remembered.

This article discusses two studies in which participants reported on self-perceptions of life-span gender-role variability based upon their expected or past performance in normative age-related developmental tasks. In Study 1, students rated themselves on the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ) at the present time and in two prospective tasks (parenthood and retirement). In Study 2, retired adults completed the PAQ at the present time and in two retrospective tasks (work-entry and parenthood). Both studies showed that participants perceived their masculine and feminine gender-role attributes as varying significantly as a result of the function of the three rating contexts, and both masculinity and femininity were perceived to increase from the chronologically earliest of these tasks to the latest.

The objective of this study is to determine whether personalty is related to attitudes toward older people. To address this question, a sample of 228 students and gerontology practitioners completed the Aging Opinion Survey, the Cattell 16 Personality Factors Test, and a demographic questionnaire. When the influence of age, sex, education, and social desirability are controlled, a constellation of personality traits remains significantly related to attitudes toward older people. Specific trait-attitude correlations are described, and traits related to positive attitudes toward older people are shown to fit within three personality groupings: low anxiety traits, sensitive-intuition traits, and intellectual ability. These traits combined with demographic variables account for up to 30 percent of the variance in attitudes toward older people. The results of this study indicate that personality traits are clearly related to attitudes toward older people.