Ursula M. Staudinger

Columbia University | CU · Columbia Aging Center (CAC), Department of Sociomedical Sciences

Backgrounds The prevalence of loneliness increases among older adults, varies across countries, and is related to within-country socioeconomic, psychosocial, and health factors. The 2000–2019 pooled prevalence of loneliness among adults 60 years and older went from 5.2% in Northern Europe to 24% in Eastern Europe, while in the US was 56% in 2012. T...

Self-regulation is crucial for learning and achievement in educational and occupational contexts. Educational self-regulation has been conceptualized as a domain-specific, context-bound competence that is open to interventions. Beyond students’ educational self-regulation (ESR), few studies examined ESR across the lifespan as a basis of competence...

Chronic disease and multimorbidity are growing health challenges for aging populations, often coinciding with retirement. We examine late-life predictors of multimorbidity, focusing on the association between retirement sequences and number of chronic diseases. We modeled the number of chronic diseases as a function of six types of previously ident...

Objectives Perceptions of time are shaped by sociohistorical factors. Specifically, economic growth and modernization often engender a sense of acceleration. Research has primarily focused on one time perception dimension (perceived time pressure) in one subpopulation (working-age adults), but it is not clear whether historical changes extend to ot...

Background and Aims Age‐related changes in physiological, metabolic and medication profiles make alcohol consumption likely to be more harmful among older than younger adults. This study aimed to estimate cross‐national variation in the quantity and patterns of drinking throughout older age, and to investigate country‐level variables explaining cro...

Background Alcohol consumption causes greater harm in older than younger adults. As the population ages, understanding cross-country and time-varying drinking patterns of older adults is of critical importance. Available evidence relies primarily on ecological data. Methods We harmonized survey data for 179,881 adults age 50+ observed repeatedly b...

What governs labour force participation in later life and why is it so different across countries? Health and labour force participation in older ages are not strongly linked, but we observe a large variation across countries in old-age labour force participation. This points to the important role of country-specific regulations governing pension r...

The literature on socio-economic variations in the association between retirement timing and health is inconclusive and largely limited to the moderating role of occupation. By selecting the sample case of Mexico where a sizeable number of older adults have no or very little formal education, this study allows the moderating role of education to be...

Background Alcohol consumption in later life has increased in the past decade, and the relationship between alcohol consumption and mortality is controversial. Recent studies suggest little, if any, health benefit to alcohol. Yet most rely on single–time point consumption assessments and minimal confounder adjustments. Methods We report on 16 year...

Wisdom is absent from current public life, even though the complex and systemic nature of the challenges of the twenty-first century seem to be an ideal match. The reasons are primarily structural in nature, that is, the success of the economic perspective. The economic perspective aims at economic growth, whereas the goal of the wisdom perspective...

Evidence suggests that reduced bottom-up processing due to aging-related brain deterioration needs to be considered when trying to understand how cognitive resources and processing arousing emotional information are associated in old age. Moreover, cognitive resources have been shown to decrease in older adults while high interindividual variabilit...

Purpose: Cognitive development during adolescence affects health long term. We investigated whether level of and change in language-based cognition during adolescence are associated with cognitive performance in midlife. Methods: Participants were enrolled in the Child Health and Development Study and followed during midlife (47-52 years). Adole...

Background: Previous research has explored the relationship between childhood and adulthood stressful life events (SLEs) and adult salivary telomere length (TL), but no research to date has tested different life-course models in which stress in adulthood may fully, partly, or not mediate the relationship between childhood stress and adult TL. Met...

Alcohol consumption is increasing in many countries, and excessive alcohol consumption is particularly increasing among older adults. Excessive alcohol consumption causes morbidity and mortality, especially among older adults, including an increased risk of depressive episodes. We review the mechanisms through which alcohol consumption may affect d...

Usually, population aging is measured to inform fiscal and social planning because it is considered to indicate the burden that an elderly population presents to the economic, social security, and health systems of a society. Measures of population aging are expected to indicate shifts in the distribution of individuals' attributes (e.g., chronolog...

There has been growing interest in the role that two types of positive personality development, that is, personality maturation towards adjustment and towards growth, might play in the development of wisdom. This research, however, has been cross-sectional. In research using performance measures of wisdom there is a shortage of longitudinal data. T...

Numerous studies examine the relationship between social stressors and telomere length (TL). Beyond considering methods and major findings, this scoping systematic review takes a novel approach as it groups studies according to the types of social stressor considered and by age groups. Following PRISMA guidelines, we searched PubMed, Web of Science...

Objective: This study analyzes the dynamic association between retirement sequences and activities of daily living (ADLs) trajectories between ages 60 and 70. Method: Retirement sequences previously established for 7,880 older Americans from the Health and Retirement Study were used in hierarchical linear and propensity score full matching model...

Background Although cognitive performance levels in old age have increased in most countries, recent evidence documents a slowing down or even decline in cohort gains in highly developed countries. The aim of this study was to assess trends and determinants in secular cohort gains in cognitive functioning among older individuals and whether cohort...

The literature that has investigated the association between wisdom and well-being has yielded conflicting results ranging from positive associations through zero to even negative associations. After defining and explaining the central constructs, the chapter will provide a review of this literature. While it seems intuitively right that wisdom sho...

The phase of retirement has been steadily growing since the 1950s. Rules and regulations related to retirement have been changing. Recent cohorts have reached this phase in better health than previous ones. Until recently, retirement has been rather void of societal expectations, leaving room for individual decisions regarding amount and type of ac...

This study analyzes the de-standardization in older Americans’ later-life careers. The focus is on the complexity in type, order, and timing of retirement sequences, as well as on their gender, class, and race stratification. Using sequence analysis on panel data including 7,881 individuals from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), this study ide...

This chapter addresses the question whether and, if so, how personality matures across adulthood. To this end, we first clarify the terminology and integrate the different notions of positive personality development in an overarching framework. This framework proposes that there are two different types of positive personality development: adjustmen...

Some studies have found that women outperform men in episodic memory after midlife. But is this finding universal, and what are the reasons? Gender differences in cognition are the result of biopsychosocial interactions throughout the life course. Social-cognitive theory of gender development posits that gender roles may play an important mediating...

Using a life course approach to look at trajectories and transitions in context, this study explores the association between late careers and health in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK). We hypothesize that precarious retirement sequences are associated with worse health in old age and that this correlation is stronger in the US th...

This symposium will discuss aging policies for the 21st century which we will argue need to strive toward a new horizon for at least three reasons: (i) the global nature of demographic change, (ii) the systemic nature of demographic change and its impact on society, and (iii) the potential synergy of increasing sustainability and responding to demo...

Work is an important environment shaping the aging processes during the adult years. In that regard its characteristics and their cumulative as well as acute effects on physical and mental health in later life deserve great attention. Given that population aging has become a global trend with ensuing changes in the global labor market, increased at...

Purpose of the study: A destandardization of labor-force patterns revolving around retirement has been observed in recent literature. It is unclear, however, to which degree and of which kind. This study looked at sequences rather than individual statuses or transitions and argued that differentiating older Americans' retirement sequences by type,...

Die Broschüre zu Übergängen, Potenzialen und Lebensplänen älterer Menschen gibt einen Überblick über die Befunde der zweiten Welle der BiB-Studie „Transitions and Old Age Potential: Übergänge und Alternspotenziale“ (TOP ). Dabei werden die Übergänge in den Ruhestand ebenso dargestellt wie Erwerbstätigkeit im Rentenalter, ehrenamtliches und familial...

Cognitive and brain aging is strongly influenced by everyday settings such as work demands. Long-term exposure to low job complexity, for instance, has detrimental effects on cognitive functioning and regional gray matter (GM) volume. Brain and cognition, however, are also characterized by plasticity. We postulate that the experience of novelty (at...

While wisdom has been a topic of interest for philosophers for centuries, in more recent times psychologists have begun studying this challenging concept, and an increasingly substantial body of empirical wisdom research now exists. Here we present theory and findings that inform definitions of wisdom and approaches to assessing it, a model demonst...

Wisdom is an ancient concept that has been the subject of intense psychological investigation since the 1980s. In this chapter, we summarize major findings from several different approaches to studying this elusive concept, from early work focused on its psychometric location to more recent work considering well-being. Important developments to dat...

In Germany as well as in most Western industrialized countries, the work-force is rapidly “aging”. Modern companies therefore increasingly need to abandon established approaches to occupational safety and pursue preventive strategies to protect and restore well-being, work ability, and good health across the entire lifespan. Hence, effective occupa...

Purpose of the study: Work is an important environment shaping the aging processes during the adult years. Therefore, the cumulative and acute effects of work characteristics on late-life health deserve great attention. Given that population aging has become a global trend with ensuing changes in labor markets around the world, increased attention...

Developmental psychologist Paul B. Baltes (1939–2006) was born in Saarlouis, Germany. After studying in Germany he moved to the United States, where he continued the conceptual and methodological quest of his doctoral dissertation to transform developmental psychology into a science that seeks to describe, explain, and modify individual differences...

I have a dream: The study of human development would make an epistemic leap due to the fact that “true” interdisciplinarity was reigning supreme and impacting the research landscape. The article argues for why that would be the case and suggests ways to make progress towards the realization of this dream. Five promoters of “true” interdisciplinarit...

In this chapter, resilience in later adulthood and old age is investigated from the perspective of life span development. According to this view, human development is characterized by multidirectionality, multifunctionality, plasticity, and permanent change of the individual's experiences of gains and losses. The activation of resilience constitute...

In contrast to the PASTOR model by Kalisch et al. we point to the potential negative long-term effects of positive (re)appraisals of events for resilience. This perspective posits that emotional reactions to events provide important guidelines as to which events, environments, or social relations should be sought out and which ones should be avoide...

Does aging impact strategy choice with regard to regulating negative emotions? Based on the assumption that older adults are highly motivated to quickly defuse negative states, we predicted that older adults, relative to young adults, would show an increased preference for distraction (a cognitive disengagement strategy) over reappraisal (a cogniti...

Chronological age is but one, and not the most accurate, indicator of human aging. Multiple outside (i.e., objective) and inside (i.e., subjective) perspectives on aging need to be considered to do justice to the multidimensionality of human development and aging. Outside perspectives are, for example, biological, social, and psychological ages. A...

Ziel dieses Beitrags ist, den Diskurs über die gesellschaftlichen Potenziale einer alternden Bevölkerung um den Aspekt der Vielfalt von Lebenslagen und -plänen beim Übergang in den Ruhestand zu erweitern. Untersuchungen zur Erwerbstätigkeit und zum Engagement im zivilgesellschaftlichen und familialen Bereich zeigen einerseits ein relatives hohes Tä...

Objective We investigated the connection between wisdom-related performance, personality, and generativity to further the understanding of how they are interrelated.Method Our sample consisted of 163 men and women participants between 68-77 years of age, mostly white, and predominantly middle class. Wisdom was assessed with the performance-based Be...

Physical activity has been demonstrated to diminish age-related brain volume shrinkage in several brain regions accompanied by a reduction of age-related decline in cognitive functions. Most studies investigated the impact of cardiovascular fitness or training. Other types of fitness or training are less well investigated. In addition, little is kn...

This study reviewed theory and results from developmental psychology to examine age differences in workplace achievement goals. We investigated whether goal level decreases with age and, by comparing the relative strength of goals among individuals, we examined whether dominant achievement goals are related to age. In a large sample of employees (N...

Despite age-related declines in some facets, cognitive functioning retains the potential for enhancement throughout the lifespan. Characteristics of the work context such as job complexity have been positively related to adult cognitive functioning (Schooler, 2007). To date, the (neurophysiological and neuropsychological) mechanisms underlying thes...

Ein verlängertes Arbeitsleben erfordert Veränderungen im herkömmlichen Ablauf von Bildung, Arbeit und Ruhestand. Durch rechtzeitige Tätigkeitswechsel kann man tätigkeitsbezogenem Verschleiß oder Überroutinisierung entgegenwirken und damit Gesundheit, Beschäftigungsfähigkeit und Produktivität auch über das aktive Arbeitsleben hinaus erhalten. Fort-...

The quest for wisdom is as old as humankind. Even though theoretical and empirical work on the psychological study of wisdom has increased tremendously over the last decades, this research in comparison is still in its infancy. It was not before the 1970s that empirical wisdom research began (Clayton, 1975). Since then, psychological wisdom researc...

Despite age-related decline in some facets, cognitive functioning retains the potential for enhancement throughout the lifespan. Characteristics of the work environment such as job complexity have been positively related to adult cognition (Schooler, 2006). The effect of repeated job-related task changes (= task mobility), as another kind of cognit...

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Reports an error in "Personality Plasticity in Later Adulthood: Contextual and Personal Resources Are Needed to Increase Openness to New Experiences" by Andrea Mühlig-Versen, Catherine E. Bowen and Ursula M. Staudinger (Psychology and Aging, Advanced Online Publication, Jul 30, 2012, np). In the article, there was an error in Table 1. In the line "...

This study demonstrates how self-evaluation processes explain subgroup differences in ratings of life satisfaction (population heterogeneity). Life domains differ with regard to the constraints they impose on beliefs in internal control. We hypothesized that these differences are linked with cognitive biases in ratings of life satisfaction. In fact...

The authors' goal is to provide a review of the evidence on developmental trajectories and adaptive functions of self, personality, and social cognition across adulthood. They adapt a dual-component model originating from the study of intellectual life-span development that distinguished between the mechanics and the pragmatics of the mind and has...

Objectives Research has consistently revealed a negative relationship between chronological age and promotion orientation, that is, the motivational orientation toward approaching possible gains. In addition, experimental research has demonstrated that activating positive self-relevant stereotypes (e.g., for men, the stereotype that men are good at...

The central objective of the present study was to investigate whether it would be possible to facilitate increases in openness to new experiences in later adulthood. Specifically, we investigated whether individuals with higher internal control beliefs (personal resource) provided with training to successfully prepare them for a challenging volunte...

This paper analyzed the effect of major positive and negative life events (marriage, divorce, birth of child, widowhood, and unemployment) on life satisfaction. For the first time, this study estimated the effects of life events not with a precision of 12 months but of 3 months. Specifically, two questions were addressed: (1) Does the precision of...

Die folgenden Ausführungen könnten auch unter dem Titel stehen: „Was ist mein Alter und wenn ja, wie viele?“ Mit einem solch launigen Titel möchte ich die Uneindeutigkeit der Bedeutung des Wortes „Alter“ in den Vordergrund rücken und das obwohl wir glauben, dass die Antwort auf die Frage „Was ist mein Alter?“ eine klare und ganz einfache ist, nämli...

PT: J; TC: 0; SU: 1; UT: WOS:000312888202549

Objectives: In the industrialized world, the mean age at which mothers give birth to their first child has increased. The purpose of this article was to review the available evidence in order to optimize preconception care in women who have postponed childbearing to the later years of the reproductive life cycle. Methods: Review of literature....

"In this article we present the interdisciplinary, developmental and systemic approach to the study of work and aging that guides research at the Jacobs Center on Lifelong Learning and Institutional Development (JCLL). We introduce basic principles of adult development including its plasticity, multi-directionality, and embeddedness in contexts. We...

Recent studies revealed a positive influence of physical activity on cognitive functioning in older adults. Studies that investigate the behavioral and neurophysiological effects of type and long term duration of physical training, however, are missing. We performed a 12-month longitudinal study to investigate the effects of cardiovascular and coor...

Wisdom represents a fruitful topic for psychological investigations for at least two reasons. First, the study of wisdom emphasizes the search for the continued optimization and the further cultural evolution of the human condition. Second, it exemplifies the collaboration of cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes. The growth and scope of...

Angesichts einer deutlich verlängerten Lebenserwartung ist es von hoher Bedeutung, dass Arbeitnehmer über den Verlauf ihres Arbeitslebens hinweg produktiv am Arbeitsleben teilhaben können. Entsprechend wird es für viele Betriebe wichtiger, die Arbeits- und Beschäftigungsfähigkeit ihrer Beschäftigten nachhaltig zu fördern, um mit alternden Belegscha...

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Since the mid-1990s, many German companies have used the part-time retirement scheme (Altersteilzeit) as an opportunity to release older workers. This was often consistent with the interests of the workers themselves. This paper explores whether workers who participate in this early retirement scheme would like to continue to work. A survey of all...

After a brief review of historical and contemporary trends in the study of the social-interactive nature of cognition, a definition of the interactive minds paradigm is presented. Cognition is social-interactive in nature in at least three respects (a) its cultural evolution as well as its ontogeny, (b) its activation and application, and (c) its r...