Li Chu

Background: With global aging, robots are considered a promising solution for handling the shortage of aged care and companionships. However, these technologies would serve little purpose if their intended users do not accept them. While the socioemotional selectivity theory predicts that older adults would accept robots that offer emotionally mea...

This study aimed to examine the underlying mechanism behind the association of age and intellectual curiosity. Previous studies generally showed a negative association between age and intellectual curiosity. To shed light on this association, we hypothesize that older adults become more selective in where they invest their curiosity compared with y...

Background and Objectives Older adults might be less information-seeking in comparison to younger adults. Yet, when a crisis hits, rather than relying on only a few information sources, it is important for people to gather information from a variety of different sources. With more information sources, people are more likely to obtain a more realist...

Objectives: Curiosity, or the desire for novel information and/or experience, is associated with improved well-being and more informed decisions, which has implications on older adults' (OAs') adoption of novel technologies. There have been suggestions that curiosity tends to decline with age. However, it was rarely studied under specific contexts...

People encounter novel situations throughout their lives that contribute to the acquisition of knowledge and experience. However, novelty can be misaligned with goals and motivation in later adulthood according to socioemotional selectivity theory. This study investigated age differences in emotional reactions associated with novel experiences. Mul...

The effectiveness of loss-framed versus gain-framed messages in attracting attention and influencing purchase intention among younger and older adults remains unclear. We tracked the eye movements of 92 younger (18-39 years) and 83 older adults (60-82 years) while they viewed 32 advertisements and reported their purchase intentions for each adverti...

Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) maintains that perceived constraints on time horizons motivate people to optimize emotionally meaningful experiences in the present, whereas expansive time horizons lead people to pursue goals that hold future utility. Theoretically, the prioritizing of goals about emotional meaning contributes to the relativ...

Background and Objectives The literature on consumer decision-making and aging suggests that older adults make less optimal buying decisions than younger adults do, partly because older adults tend to perceive salespersons’ faces as more trustworthy. This study aims to directly test the difference in the effect of perceived facial trustworthiness o...

Background Although the majority of existing literature has suggested positive effects of housework on older adults’ health and survival rate, the underlying mechanisms of such effects remain unclear. To address potential mechanisms, the present study examined the association between older adults’ housework engagement and days of survival across 14...

Lack of social interaction is associated with a heightened sense of loneliness and, in turn, poorer psychological well-being. Despite the prevalence of communicating with others virtually even when physically alone, whether the social interaction–loneliness–well-being relationship is different between face-to-face and virtual interactions and betwe...

Objectives: Negative attitudes towards ageing have been associated with poor mental well-being, and protective factors are not well-understood. This study examined the relationship between ageing attitudes and symptoms of anxiety and depression, and the potential moderating effect of age, and buffering effects of social support, physical activity a...

Previous research has shown mixed results regarding the effects of doing housework. While some earlier studies have found no association between performing heavy housework and health, other studies have found various benefits of doing housework, including body leanness and lower mortality rate. This study examined the effects of housework on older...

Objectives. Physical distancing to reduce the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 has increased alone time, with unintended mental health ramifications including increased loneliness, which may be particularly detrimental for older adults. We investigated time-varying associations between daily time to oneself and loneliness, and the role of eve...

Socioemotional selectivity theory proposes that older adults engage in less information-seeking than younger adults as future time perspective becomes more limited and expansive goals are prioritized less. However, gathering information is crucial in emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for older adults, who are particularly vulnerabl...

Is feeling curious a pleasant, anxious or mixed feeling experience? Dual process theory posits that curiosity results from an optimal level of knowledge gap anxiety. Yet, personal growth facilitation model suggests that people are intrinsically curious, which is associated with positive affects. While curiosity may be pleasant or anxious, it may al...

With global aging, it is crucial to understand how older adults and the process of aging are viewed by members of society. These attitudes can often influence how older adults are treated. Since the Journal of Gerontology was founded, we have gained increasing insights into attitudes toward aging, with several notable research developments, includi...

Curiosity is commonly defined as “the desire for new information and experience.” While curiosity has been associated with numerous positive outcomes (e.g., improved well-being, better cognitive performance and longer life expectancy, some studies suggested that curiosity declined with age. However, very few studies actually attempt to examine why...

Being curious has various physical, social and psychological benefits. However, theories like the socioemotional selectivity theory suggest that information seeking goals tend to be overshadowed by emotionally meaningful goals with age. Personality and social psychology research also found consistent decline of curiosity in later adulthood. In cont...

Objectives: Prior studies have found that as people age, they value low-arousal positive affect (LAP) to a greater extent and high-arousal positive affect (HAP) to a lower extent. We aimed to investigate whether actually achieving those ideal affects was related to better well-being outcomes, measured in terms of meaning in life. Methods: Using...

Understanding older adults' attitude toward robots has become increasingly important as robots have been introduced in various settings, such as retirement homes. We investigated whether there are age differences in both implicit and explicit attitudes toward robots after interacting with an assistive robot. Twenty-four younger and 24 older adults...

Cognitive processing of social and nonsocial information changes with age. These processes range from the ones that serve “mere” cognitive functions, such as recall strategies and reasoning, to those that serve functions that pertain to self-regulation and relating to others. However, aging and the development of social cognition unfold in differen...

Background and objective: The study aimed to identify how structural and cognitive aspects of social capital were associated with cognitive health among community-dwelling older adults. In addition, the mediation pathways and the moderating role of age were investigated. Research design and methods: Data from two community-based cohort studies of o...