Effects Of Aging - Related Stereotypes On Working Memory And Prospective Memory In The Elderly

It is known that all aspects of the physical function will fall as the growth of the age, for example:old people’s visual,’hearing and health conditions were also worse than young people. Especially a lot of research suggests that the age difference existed in the memory, the memory of old people to be less than the young. Numbers of study have shown that aging stereotypes and aging self-stereotype may also affect the memory ability of old people besides age. But these studies just focus on such as some types of memory, for example:free recall, false memory, graphics memory, location memory; these types of memory are belongs to retrospective memory. But very few studies were care about the influence of aging stereotype and aging self-stereotypes toward working memory and prospective memory. Retrospective memory refers to have happened a memory; Working memory refers to the memory of what is happening; the prospective memory refers to memories of the future is going to happen. The three types of memory are very important to individual life, especially for the elderly life. Therefore, this study on the basis of previous studies to further explore the effect of aging stereotypes and aging self-stereotypes toward the older people’s working memory and prospective memory; and at the same time to explore what the aging attitude towards the other elderly which was possess by the old people under the background of Chinese culture. Experiment1explores aging stereotype toward the elderly population under the background of Chinese culture; and to find whether gender, age, level of education can influence on aging stereotypes; Experiment2explored the effect of aging stereotype and aging self-stereotypes on working memory in the elderly; Experiment3explored the effect of aging stereotype and aging self-stereotypes on prospective memory in the elderly. The results showed that:(1) The aging stereotypes towards other old population of elderly were more positive under the background of Chinese culture;(2) The higher degree of education, the more negative aging stereotypes;(3) The elderly population is more and more negative aging stereotypes as the growth of the age; (4) The working memory capacity of the old people who have more positive aging stereotype is higher than the elderly who have more negative aging stereotype;(5) The prime of positive aging self-stereotype can improve the level of the working memory of old people;(6) Positive aging self-stereotype can improve the reaction of the elderly on-going task; And negative aging self-stereotype prime have bad impact on the performance of on-going task;(7) Prime negative aging self-stereotype have benefits to the raise prospective memory of old people;(8)The elderly who have positive aging stereotypes was more susceptible of the prime of positive aging self-stereotypes; whereas the elderly who have negative aging stereotypes was more susceptible of the prime of negative aging self-stereotypes.