Klaus Rothermund

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• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Views on aging (VoA) have consequences for development across the lifespan affecting the aging process of individuals in important ways. Previous research has shown that how individuals perceive their own aging (i.e., personal VoA) predict how many years they live, with more positive self-views being associated with decreased risk of mortality. Whi...

In the face of prevailing negative views on old age, aging individuals try to maintain the self-concept of a young person. They may do so by feeling younger than they are or by shifting the threshold of old age. According to the dual-process theory of developmental regulation, the former represents an assimilative coping process, whereas the latter...

The household represents a proximal social context whose members can convey various expectations to each other, including expectations for active aging. We used a nationally representative sample (N = 2007, aged 16–94 years) to investigate the household predictors of perceived expectations for active aging (PEAA, i.e., “activation demands” targetin...

Widowhood is a significant life event that can profoundly alter an individual’s perception of time. Those who have lost a spouse often find themselves reflecting on past memories, while simultaneously feeling disconnected from the present. However, the impact of widowhood on one’s experience and perception of time has not been thoroughly explored....

We examined long-term contingency learning (CL) in a color classification task with two separate sets of non-overlapping color-word contingencies that were employed in alternating blocks of the task (“alternating blocks paradigm”). Analyzing only the first occurrences of the word distractors in each block provides a pure indicator of long-term CL t...

Recent research on relational evaluative conditioning (relational EC) suggests that stimulus co-occurrence can have a direct effect on evaluations over and above the particular relation between the co-occurring stimuli. This research is based on a process dissociation approach where co-occurrence effects are demonstrated via attenuated evaluative l...

Introduction: The idea that older adults should contribute to the common good has become a social normative belief (i.e., social activation). Younger and – even more so – older adults prescribe social activation to the group of older adults. Older adults are assumed to behave in line with what is socially expected of them. However, previous studies...

In the valence contingency learning task (VCT), participants evaluate target words which are preceded by nonwords. Nonwords are predictive for positive/negative evaluations. Previous studies demonstrated that this results in (a) reliable contingency learning effects, reflected in better performance for highly contingent nonword-valence pairings and...

The concept of implicit bias – the idea that the unconscious mind might hold and use negative evaluations of social groups that cannot be documented via explicit measures of prejudice – is a hot topic in the social and behavioral sciences. It has also become a part of popular culture, while interventions to reduce implicit bias have been introduced...

This study delves into the complexities of individuals’ desires for longevity and their willingness to live with impairment. When deciding about their longevity desires, some individuals may focus on present-oriented, concrete aspects of their lives, like their current state of health, whereas others may weigh up more future-oriented, abstract aspe...

Older individuals face increasing social expectations and demands to remain active and participate in society. Perceived expectations for active aging (PEAA) refer to older adults’ recognizing such expectations as being directed at them personally. Previous studies, investigating PEAA as a relatively stable trait-like construct, showed that most in...

Subjective representations of time are an important predictor of well-being. How time is structured and represented in individual behavior and experience, is itself subject to developmental change. Young adults focus on preparing for their future, whereas during midlife, shifts towards a more present-oriented time perspective should arise. Realizin...

In learning research, there is an ongoing debate about the role of awareness in human contingency learning. While a large part of the contingency learning (CL) effect actually reflects episodic retrieval of previous responses (C. G. Giesen et al., 2020; Schmidt et al., 2020), a significant residual CL effect remains, which reflects a genuine impact...

There is an ongoing debate about the role of top-down influences on episodic binding and retrieval processes. The Binding and Retrieval in Action Control (BRAC) framework postulates that both, binding and retrieval, are modulated by top-down processes, such as awareness and instructions (Frings et al., 2020). To test this assumption, we conducted a...

There is an ongoing debate about the role of top-down influences on episodic binding and retrieval processes. The Binding and Retrieval in Action Control (BRAC) framework postulates that both, binding and retrieval, are modulated by top-down processes, such as awareness and instructions (Frings et al., 2020). To test this assumption, we conducted a...

Introduction. Subjective life expectancy (SLE) is considered an indicator of future time perspective and has implications for developmental outcomes in different areas of life. Previous studies rarely took a lifespan approach, although it would allow for a better understanding of whether the factors affecting SLE vary with participants’ chronologic...

Older adults are faced with societal normative expectations that set standards for age-appropriate behavior. They supposedly align their behavior with what is socially expected of them to avoid backlash and disapproval. However, a link between societal norms and older adults’ behavior has not been established in previous studies. In a pre-registere...

Objectives: Perceived expectations for active aging (PEAA) reflect subjective exposure to social expectations about staying active and fit in old age, for example, by maintaining health and social engagement. We investigated whether motivational and personality factors were related to PEAA in the domains of physical health, mental health, and soci...

Time perspective is an important predictor of well-being. How time is represented, is itself subject to developmental change. A time perspective dominated by the future is increasingly replaced by one focused on the present and past as remaining lifetime decreases. These age-related changes supposedly are associated with higher subjective well-bein...

When a stimulus is paired with a response, a stimulus-response (SR) binding (or event file) is formed. Subsequent stimulus repetition retrieves the SR binding from memory, which facilitates (impedes) performance when the same (a different) response is required. We aimed to explore whether indirect retrieval of SR bindings by a newly learnt associat...

Findings from the Ageing as Future project prove that variability and vulnerability are the main characteristics of old age. The chapter discusses the project’s findings concerning the role of vulnerability of old age as a shared framework within which social diversity and ambivalence of aging manifests itself. It is suggested that based on such in...

An essential part of the project Ageing as Future consists of examining views on ageing. In other words, we are investigating the ideas that people have about old age in general, but also about their old age. The chapter reports core findings on how views on aging shape individual development in old age.

The diversity of age and ageing and the experience of old age was a central concern of the project Ageing as Future . From images of old age to provision for the future and actions over time, there is a consistent indication that age and aging can be best analyzed and understood related to specific life contexts.

The Ageing as Future project combined and used a variety of multidisciplinary, multicultural, multimethodological, and longitudinal approaches. The chapter provides an overview of the approach and the process of the surveys of the various subprojects in Germany, the USA, Hong Kong and also in Taiwan and the Czech Republic.

There is an ongoing debate about the cognitive mechanisms behind human contingency learning (CL). Although, in some studies, episodic retrieval of previous responses fully explained the observed CL effects (C. G. Giesen et al., 2020; Schmidt et al., 2020), other findings suggest that global contingencies have an additional effect on behavior (Xu &...

Objectives: Prescriptive views of aging (PVoA) are normative age-based expectations about age-appropriate behavior for older adults, e.g. that they should stay fit/active (active aging norms) but also behave altruistically toward younger generations (altruistic disengagement norms). We aimed at examining age differences in endorsement of active ag...

In basketball, an attacking player often plays a pass to one side while looking to the other side. This head fake provokes a conflict in the observing opponent, as the processing of the head orientation interferes with the processing of the pass direction. Accordingly, responses to passes with head fakes are slower and result in more errors than re...

We introduce the test difficulty concept from classical test theory to tackle the issue of low predictive power of implicit association tests (IATs). Following classical test theory, we argue that IATs of moderate difficulty (defined as mean IAT scores of zero) have more predictive power than IATs of extreme difficulties (defined as mean IAT scores...

Objectives: Depression is a prevalent mental health condition that also often affects older adults. The PROACTIVE psychosocial intervention was developed to reduce depressive symptomatology among older adults within primary care settings in Brazil. An important psychological marker that affects individuals' aging experience relates to how old peop...

A conditioned response to a stimulus can be transferred to an associated stimulus, as seen in sensory preconditioning. In this research paper, we aimed to explore this phenomenon using a stimulus–response contingency learning paradigm using voluntary actions as responses. We conducted two preregistered experiments that explored whether a learned re...

The literature on action control is rife with differences in terminology. This consensus statement contributes shared definitions for perception-action inte- gration concepts as informed by the framework of event coding.

Emotional aging research is dominated by the idea of age-related improvements that result from shifts in motivation. Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) proposes that as individuals age, they increasingly favor emotion-related goals and savor positive but avoid negative emotions. Previous age-comparative studies on everyday emotional experience...

Prescriptive views of aging are beliefs about how older adults should be and behave. The two most prominent views entail that older adults should remain active and contribute to society (active aging) and that they should withdraw from important positions (altruistic disengagement). Prescriptive views of aging set societal standards for age (in)app...

Negative age stereotypes have negative, assimilative effects on the subjective aging experience due to internalization processes, but positive contrast effects are reported as well, reflecting dissociation and downward comparisons. Our aim was thus to compare short-term and long-term consequences of age stereotypes on the subjective aging experienc...

Normative expectations about how older adults should behave are known as prescriptive age stereotypes (or “prescriptive views of aging,” PVoA). Previous research has shown that endorsement of PVoA varies across age groups but has not yet examined the variability of PVoA endorsement across countries. Considering that context may influence the endors...

Age discrimination is pervasive in most societies and bears far-reaching consequences for individuals’ psychological well-being. Despite that, studies that examine cross-cultural differences in age discrimination are still lacking. Likewise, whether the detrimental association between age discrimination and psychological well-being varies across co...

Objectives Preparing for old age is an adaptive behavior with positive consequences on well-being. This study examined; (a) the degree to which the importance associated with positive outcomes within specific domains of everyday functioning (e.g., social relationships, health) varies across ages and cultures; (b) the impact of importance on prepari...

We define aging as a characteristic deterioration in one (or more) observable attributes of an organism that typically occurs during later life. With this narrow functional definition, we gain the freedom to separate aging from other processes of age-related change (e.g., maturation, growth, illness, terminal decline). We introduce a structural mod...

Stimulus–response binding and retrieval (SRBR) is a fundamental mechanism driving behavior automatization. In five experiments, we investigated the modulatory role of affective consequences (AC) on SRBR effects to test whether binding/retrieval can explain instrumental learning (i.e., the “law of effect”). SRBR effects were assessed in a sequential...

Background and Objectives Longevity is a societal achievement. However, people might not wish to live long lives under all conditions. When deciding about their longevity desires some individuals may focus on present-oriented, concrete aspects of their life, like their current state of health, whereas others may weigh up more future-oriented, abstr...

Older adults are faced with prescriptions to remain fit and socially engaged (active aging) or limit consumption of social resources (altruistic disengagement), and violations of these may result in backlash and marginalization. Despite such negative consequences that prescriptive views of aging (PVoA) may have for older adults, whether PVoA endors...

The Reaction Time-Based Concealed Information Test (RT-CIT) was designed to detect familiarity with crime-related information. However, RT-CIT results can be manipulated by preparing innocent-looking responses for these probes. We developed a new paradigm allowing us to assess such response preparation processes. In each trial of the task, a crime-...

Measures of automatic propositional self-evaluation have been shown to predict adverse outcomes above and beyond measures of deliberate self-evaluation, thereby suggesting an independent source of automatic self-evaluation that might also provide a pathway to change self-esteem and its correlates. Based on theoretical models of automatic, propositi...

Objectives. Negative age stereotypes have negative, assimilative effects on the subjective aging experience due to internalization processes, but sometimes positive contrast effects are reported as well, reflecting dissociation and downward comparisons. Our aim was thus to compare short-term and long-term consequences of age stereotypes on the subj...

Objectives: Past studies showed that intergenerational contact is beneficial in improving attitudes toward older people. To date, however, research on the benefits of contact with older adults focused on younger adults (intergenerational contact), overlooking the effects for older adults (contact with same-age peers). In this study we investigated...

Objective: Emotional aging research is dominated by the idea of age-related improvements that result from shifts in motivation. Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) proposes that as individuals age, they increasingly favor emotion-related goals and savor positive but avoid negative emotions. Previous age-comparative studies on everyday emotiona...

Endorsement of implicit age stereotypes was assessed with the propositional evaluation paradigm (PEP) in a high-powered, preregistered study, comprising samples of young (n = 89) and older (n = 125) adults. To investigate whether implicit age stereotypes shape the behavior via self-stereotyping (“embodiment”), we examined whether implicit endorseme...

Intergenerational contact is beneficial for improving attitudes toward older people, including age stereotypes (AS). To date, however, research on the topic has focused on younger adults (intergenerational contact), overlooking the possible perks for older adults themselves (contact with same-age peers). The current study investigated the associati...

Retirement is a normative life transition that liberates the individual from the external obligations of employment , being a catalyzer of leisure activity engagement. However, the individual's motivations to engage in leisure activities in the time that is gained after retirement may depend on their future self-views (i.e., views of their own agei...

Extending research on determinants of preparations for old age across adulthood, we examined the relationship between well-being, perceived control, and preparations for old age over time, along with variation in the strength of these relationships depending on domains of functioning, cultures, and age. We analyzed longitudinal data from the Ageing...

This chapter focuses on prescriptive views of aging, which reflect expectations about how older adults should be and behave. We identify four prescriptive views of aging: Disengagement (making way for young people, using resources moderately, not trying to appear young), activation (staying fit and healthy, maintaining an active and productive life...

Objective Aging attitudes have important consequences on functioning in later life. A critical question concerns whether such attitudes may bias perceptions of one’s own aging, with potentially negative effects on important outcomes. Method Using data from adults aged 30 – 85 yrs in Germany (n=623), Hong Kong (n=317), and the US (n=313), we examin...

Exposure to expectations for active aging may be modulated by age and individual resources (socioeconomic status, social integration, and health) via multiple pathways. Using a cross-sectional, nationally representative sample of adults aged 17 to 94 (N = 2,007), we investigated the relations between age, individual resources, and perceived expecta...

Proportion congruency (PC) effects on the strength of distractor interference were investigated in a high-powered (n = 109), pre-registered experiment in which participants had to identify the ink color of color words. Replicating the standard PC effect, Stroop interference was larger in blocks comprising mostly congruent word-color combinations, c...

Previous studies demonstrated that contingency learning can be both (a) unaware (Schmidt et al., 2007), and (b) explained in terms of an automatic retrieval of stimulus-response bindings from the last episode in which the cue stimulus has been presented (Giesen et al., 2020; Schmidt et al., 2020). We investigated whether learning is selective in a...

Previous studies demonstrated binding and retrieval of stimuli and correct responses even for those episodes in which the actual response was wrong (goal-based binding and retrieval). In the current study, we tested whether binding based on a co-activation of stimuli and erroneous responses occurred simultaneously with goal-based binding, which cou...

The investigation of what enables societies and individuals to age well remains one of the greatest challenges of our time. Views on aging are a decisive factor in this process, and thus, improving their understanding through cross-cultural research is of utmost importance. In the current review, we address the role of socio-ecological variables an...

Previous research on event coding has shown that by default, bindings are binary and elemental, that is, individual objects or single features of these objects can retrieve responses separately and independently. In our study, we applied these findings to the automatic retrieval of former deceptions. Specifically, we investigated whether the person...

Objective: In a series of three studies (N = 187), we investigated the correlation between implicit and explicit age stereotypes, both of which were assessed in a context-dependent way. Methods: To assess implicit age stereotypes, we presented combinations of age category and specific context information as primes in a lexical decision task (LDT...

Preparation for old age is a multi-faceted phenomenon that comprises different activities aimed at improving or alleviating the conditions of life in areas like finances, housing, social and family relations, leisure, work, and emergency situations. Findings from a longitudinal German survey that was conducted in the Aging-as-Future project reveale...

In this study, we investigated endorsement of two types of prescriptive views of aging, namely active aging (e.g., prescriptions for older adults to stay fit and healthy and to maintain an active and productive lifestyle) and altruistic disengagement (e.g., prescriptions for older adults to behave altruistically toward the younger generation by gra...

Objective: Correlational research aiming to validate measures and the construct of implicit self-esteem (ISE) has produced heterogeneous results in the past. We argue that this might be caused by two underappreciated obstacles: the situational malleability of and the construct irrelevant variance in conventional ISE measures. In this study, we aim...

In this study, we investigated explicit and implicit endorsement of prescriptive age stereotypes. To achieve that, we captured endorsement of a wide range of prescriptive expectations targeting both younger (younger adults are expected to be ambitious, eager to learn, unconventional, respectful) and older (older adults are expected to stay active,...

Observing how another person responds to a stimulus creates stimulus-response (SR) episodes. These can be retrieved from memory on later occasions, which means that observed responses are utilized for regulating one’s own actions. Until now, evidence for storage and retrieval of observationally acquired SR episodes was limited to dyadic face-to-fac...

Since March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing efforts to contain its spread have caused major problems with public health, along with social and economic disruptions. This Special Issue addresses how coping with the pandemic has been shaped by the interplay between cognition and emotion. The various contributions to this Special Issue explore...

The current study investigated category-based activation of stereotypes when processing of the category primes is mandatory. In three high-powered pre-registered experiments (total n = 211), we compared responses to age-stereotypic traits (e.g., lonely) after presenting matching versus mismatching category primes (old vs. young faces) of which the...

Age discrimination is pervasive in society which bears far-reaching consequences for individuals in terms of decreased psychological and physical health. Age discrimination can be experienced in different life-domains and perceived as a social (others’ experiences) or as a personal phenomenon (own experiences). Our first goal was to examine country...

This session will focus on aging attitudes and their effects on different aspects of development in old age (e.g., preparation, age stereotypes, age discrimination, and well-being). Cultural differences and how they shape individual aging are also explored. The first two presentations focus on cross-cultural differences in preparation for old-age....

A considerable gap between one’s pension and living expenses in old age exists in almost all developed countries, making savings and financial preparation for old age inevitable. Nevertheless, financial preparation for old age substantially differs across countries. Using the data from the AAF project, we investigated what motivates people in diffe...

Binding between representations of stimuli and actions and later retrieval of these compounds provide efficient shortcuts in action control. Recent observations indicate that these mechanisms are not only effective when action episodes go as planned, but they also seem to be at play when actions go awry. Moreover, the human cognitive system even co...

Affective experience is inherently dynamic and short-term changes in affect are supposed to offer important insights into well-being. Past years have shown a tremendous rise in investigations into the relation between affect dynamics and well-being. The indicators that have been introduced to capture unique dynamical aspects of affect, however, hav...

Krause et al. (2012) demonstrated that evaluative responses elicited by self-related primes in an affective priming task have incremental validity over explicit self-esteem in predicting self-serving biases in performance estimations and expectations in an anagram task. We conducted a conceptual replication of their experiment in which we added a b...

Age discrimination can undermine older people’s motivation to stay engaged with their lives and poses a major challenge to healthy aging. In this article, we review research on age discrimination in different life domains, including health and work. Motivation and health constitute potential antecedents as well as outcomes of age discrimination, wi...

We examined the domain-specific views of young and old people held by young (18–30 years, n = 278) and older adults (60–85 years, n = 289) in Germany, the USA, and India. Views about old and young people differed between life domains but were mostly similar across age groups and countries. Older adults in the USA and Germany – but not in India – he...

In two pre-registered studies, we investigated whether processes of imitative action regulation are facilitated after experiencing an episode of social exclusion. We reasoned that imitative action regulation effects should be more pronounced for participants who were socially excluded, providing them with an “automatic means” to socially reconnect...

Building on the seminal definition of “healthy aging” by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2015; 2020), we present a model of motivation and healthy aging that is aimed at identifying the central psychological constructs and processes for understanding what older persons value, and how they can attain and maintain these valued aspects of their li...

When individuals suppress secret information, they should keep this omission in mind to not let this information slip out in future situations. Following recent findings about automatic memory retrieval of outright lies, we hypothesized that suppression tendencies are also automatically retrieved from memory when being confronted with a question to...

Affective experience is inherently dynamic and short-term changes in affect are supposed to offer important insights into well-being. Past years have shown a tremendous rise in investigations into the relation between affect dynamics and well-being. The indicators of affect dynamic that have been introduced to capture unique dynamical aspects of af...

Objectives. Attributing life changes to age represents a core marker of the subjective experience of aging. The aims of our study were to investigate views on aging as origins of age-related attributions of life changes, and to investigate the implications of these age-related attributions for personal control and life satisfaction. Method. Life...

Action planning can be construed as the temporary binding of features of perceptual action effects. While previous research demonstrated binding for task-relevant, body-related effect features, the role of task-irrelevant or environment-related effect features in action planning is less clear. Here, we studied whether task-relevance or body-related...

Research with implicit measures has been criticized for an unclear meaning of the term “implicit”, inadequate psychometric properties, as well as problems regarding internal validity and low predictive validity of implicit measures. To these criticisms, we add an overly restrictive theoretical focus and research agenda that is limited to the narrow...

A cumulative emotion science requires sustained investments in theory development. To encourage such investments, a new section will be added to Cognition & Emotion that is specifically devoted to theory. In this Editorial, we first lay out the rationale for the new Theory section. Next, we consider the added value of theory for research on cogniti...

Background: There is an ongoing discussion about the addictive strength of caffeine. According to the incentive-sensitization theory, the development and the maintenance of drug addiction is the result of a selective sensitization of brain regions that are relevant for wanting without a corresponding increase in liking. Dissociations of wanting and...

We investigated automatic retrieval of the knowledge of having lied or having told the truth to a question, depending on (a) the quality of the statement (true vs. false response) and (b) the overall proportion of (dis-)honest responses. We therefore manipulated the proportion of lies and truths being told in an oral interview. Automatic retrieval...

Trust between couples is a prerequisite for stable and satisfactory romantic relationships. However, there has been no valid research tool to assess partner-specific trust behavior including costly investments in the trustworthiness of the romantic partner. We here present a comprehensive validation of the newly developed Trust Game for Couples (TG...

Human action control relies on representations that integrate perception and action, but the relevant research is scattered over various experimental paradigms and the theorizing is overly paradigm-specific. To overcome this obstacle we propose BRAC (binding and retrieval in action control), an overarching, integrative framework that accounts for a...

This special issue of Cognition and Emotion assembles recent advances in theorizing and empirical research on the automaticity of evaluative learning. Based on a taxonomy of automatic processes in evaluative learning, we distinguish between processes that are involved in translating evaluative experiences into evaluative mental representations (acq...

Objectives: We developed brief versions of our questionnaires to assess domain-specific views on aging (age stereotypes and future self-views) and preparation for age-related changes. Methods: The brief scales were validated in an online study with N = 301 participants aged 23 - 88 years. Results: Mean values across domains show a differentiat...

A habit is a regularity in automatic responding to a specific situation. Classical learning psychology explains the emergence of habits by an extended learning history during which the response becomes associated to the situation (learning of stimulus-response associations) as a function of practice (“law of exercise”) and/or reinforcement (“law of...

Zusammenfassung. Die Kognitionspsychologische Grundlagenforschung zur Handlungskontrolle hat inzwischen eine große Zahl sehr spezifischer Aspekte von Handlungen in diversen Experimentalparadigmen isoliert und beleuchtet, sodass der gegenwärtige Forschungsstand durch eine kaum übersehbare Flut unverbundener Phänomene und paradigmen-spezifischer Mode...

We all have heard that the world population in industrialized countries has been—and will be—going through a stark demographic change. Specifically, such a shift in the age structure encompasses a decrease in the proportion of younger people coupled with an increased number of older adults in the population. How this resultant “aging world” affects...

Two decades ago, the introduction of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) sparked enthusiastic reactions. With implicit measures like the IAT, researchers hoped to finally be able to bridge the gap between self-reported attitudes on one hand and behavior on the other. Twenty years of research and several meta-analyses later, however, we have to conc...