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Highlighting and Reducing the Impact of Negative Aging Stereotypes During Older Adults' Cognitive Testing
Published on: January 24, 2020
Older people and death-thought accessibility: The association between death and older people in memory
Valérian Boudjemadi1, Alexandra Posner1, Jennifer Bastart2
1Psychology of Cognition Laboratory, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France.
Abstract:
This work aimed to conceptually replicate and extend Martens, Greenberg, Schimel, and Landau's findings about older people as threatening future self. We conducted two studies using a lexical decision task to measure death-thought accessibility. Results showed that older people primes lead to stronger facilitation of death-related compared, with negative words. Such a facilitation is not observed with young people primes (Study 1). Moreover, the automatic association between the representation of older people and death was stronger when participants and older people primes were of the same sex (Study 2). Implications of these findings with respect to ageism are discussed.
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