Mike Martin

University of Zurich | UZH · Gerontology Center

Natural language use is a promising candidate for the development of innovative measures of well-being to complement self-report measures. The type of words individuals use can reveal important psychological processes that underlie well-being across the lifespan. In this preregistered, cross-sectional study, we propose a conceptual model of languag...

With this article, we address some of the theoretical and methodological issues faced when attempting to take a developmental approach to understand a psychological phenomenon that encompasses the entire lifespan, that is, from birth to old age. Most prominent among these issues is the challenge of defining and operationalizing a psychological cons...

Prominent theories of aging emphasize the importance of resource allocation processes as a means to maintain functional ability, well-being and quality of life. Little is known about which activities and what activity patterns actually characterize the daily lives of healthy older adults in key domains of functioning, including the spatial, physica...

Introduction: Mobility as a multidimensional concept has rarely been examined as a day-to-day varying phenomenon in its within-person association with older adults' daily well-being. This study examined associations between daily mobility and daily well-being in community-dwelling older adults with a set of GPS-derived mobility indicators that wer...

Increase in very old individuals is observed in all developed countries around the world. The number of centenarians has also been rising, requiring the investigation of the characteristics of these exceptionally long-lived individuals as well as their experience of life at age 100. In the present study, we present findings from the first nation-wi...

Mobility as a multidimensional concept has rarely been examined as a day-to-day varying phenomenon in its within-person association with older adults’ daily well-being. Using a custom-built mobile GPS sensor („uTrail“) combined with a smartphone-based ambulatory assessment, this study examined associations between daily mobility and daily well-bein...

While experiencing the unpredictable events of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are likely to turn to people in order to regulate our emotions. In this research, we investigate how this interpersonal emotion regulation is connected to affective symptoms, above and beyond intrapersonal emotion regulation. Furthermore, we explore whether perceived psychosoc...

With growing use of machine learning algorithms and big data in health applications, digital measures, such as digital biomarkers, have become highly relevant in digital health. In this paper, we focus on one important use case, the long-term continuous monitoring of cognitive ability in older adults. Cognitive ability is a factor both for long-ter...

The increasing global prevalence of dementia demands concrete actions that are aimed strategically at optimizing processes that drive clinical innovation. The first step in this direction requires outlining hurdles in the transition from research to practice. The different parties needed to support translational processes have communication mismatc...

The Mobility, Activity, and Social Interactions Study (MOASIS) is part of a global effort to more closely examine indicators of functional ability in relation to person characteristics and life contexts as proposed by the WHO’s healthy aging definition. In MOASIS, sensor-based and self-reported mobility and activity indicators were used to capture...

With growing usage of machine learning algorithms and big data in health applications, digital biomarkers have become an important key feature to ensure the success of those applications. In this paper, we focus on one important use-case, the long-term continuous monitoring of the cognitive ability of older adults. The cognitive ability is a factor...

Studies infer Psychological Balance from the absence of psychopathology. In this article, we investigated this construct as an antecedent of well-being. We present empirical evidence toward the validation of a new theoretical model regarding Psychological Balance, a dynamic state with relatively constant characteristics, comprising Consistency and...

Obwohl die Bedeutung von Bildungsangeboten nach dem Berufsleben in der Schweiz wächst, ist kaum etwas über das Bildungsbedürfnis von älteren Personen in der Schweiz bekannt: Was motiviert sie zur Teilnahme an solchen Angeboten, wie zufrieden sind sie mit diesen Angeboten und welche Erwartungen/Wünsche haben sie in Bezug auf diese Angebote? Um diese...

Reminiscence—the act of recalling or telling others about relevant personal past experiences—plays an important role in the well-being of older adults. Therefore, it is relevant to develop intelligent systems aiming at improving the well-being of the elderly by reliably detecting reminiscence in their everyday life conversations. Data imbalance is...

In dyadic interaction, a verbal focus on one individual (“you-talk”, “I-talk”), rather than on the couple (“we-talk”) has predominantly been linked to dysfunctional relationship processes. However, context differences in these links have not yet been systematically examined. Is it functional to asymmetrically focus on one partner during support int...

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...

Models of healthy aging highlight the motivating influence of social connections. Social experiences constantly shape our thoughts and behaviors throughout daily life, and these daily processes slowly and consistently influence our health and well-being. In this paper, we discuss research that has moved from cross-sectional laboratory designs empha...

Due to the increasingly heterogeneous trajectories of aging, gerontology requires theoretical models and empirical methods that can meaningfully, reliably, and precisely describe, explain, and predict causes and effects within the aging process, considering particular contexts and situations. Human behavior occurs in contexts; nevertheless, situati...

When experiencing personal distress, people usually expect their romantic partner to be supportive. However, when put in a situation to provide support, people may at times (still) be struggling with issues of their own. This interdependent nature of dyadic coping interactions as well as potential spillover effects is mirrored in the state-of-the-a...

Introduces the consequences of the healthy aging concept of the WHO (2020) for the measurement and monitoring of healthy aging worldwide.

Background: Language use and social interactions have demonstrated a close relationship with cognitive measures. It is important to improve the understanding of language use and behavioral indicators from social context to study the early prediction of cognitive decline among healthy populations of older adults. Objective: This study aimed at pr...

BACKGROUND Language use and social interactions have demonstrated a close relationship with cognitive measures. It is important to improve the understanding of language use and behavioral indicators from social context to study the early prediction of cognitive decline among healthy populations of older adults. OBJECTIVE This study aimed at predic...

While language style is considered to be automatic and relatively stable, its plasticity has not yet been studied in translations that require the translator to “step into the shoes of another person.” In the present study, we propose a psychological model of language adaptation in translations. Focusing on an established interindividual difference...

Objectives Individuals’ social connections and interpersonal experiences can both shape and be shaped by cognitive functioning. This study examines longitudinal within-person associations between quality of social relations, structure of social relations, and cognitive functioning in older age. Method We examined 16-year longitudinal data (3 waves...

Normal aging is generally associated with deterioration in a number of cognitive abilities, although large individual differences in size and progression of age-related cognitive change exist. Cognitive training interventions have become an increasingly important object of research, aiming at the stabilization and improvement of cognitive abilities...

This handbook is a practical guide on how to successfully design and run co-created Citizen Science projects, with some specific tips for practitioners in Zurich. The handbook is organized in parts that can be seen as a sequence of consecutive steps, or can be accessed at one’s convenience for suggestions and recommendations on different aspects of...

The huge power for social influence of digital media may come with the risk of intensifying common societal biases, such as gender and age stereotypes. Speaker’s gender and age also behaviorally manifest in language use, and language may be a powerful tool to shape impact. The present study took the example of TED, a highly successful knowledge dis...

Individuals’ social connections can both shape and be shaped by cognitive abilities in aging process. This study examined bidirectional longitudinal associations between cognitive abilities and social relationships using 12-year longitudinal data (3 waves) from 499 German older adults who were born between year 1930 and 1932. Cognitive abilities we...

Full-length paper: Luo, M., Debelak, R., Schneider, G., Martin, M., & Demiray, B. (2020). With a little help from familiar interlocutors: real-world language use in young and older adults. Aging & Mental Health, 1-10. #################################################################################################### ##################### Real-worl...

Using smartphone sensing in real life, we examined conversational time travel (i.e., talking about the personal past versus future), its functions and relation with positive affect (i.e., laughing behavior). We used the Electronically Activated Recorder (audio recorder that periodically records snippets of ambient sounds and speech) and collected a...

When experiencing personal distress, people usually expect their romantic partner to be supportive. However, when put in a situation to provide support, people may at times (still) be struggling with issues of their own. This interdependent nature of dyadic coping interactions as well as potential spillover effects are mirrored in the state-of-the-...

Objectives: Functional psychologists are concerned with the performance of cognitive activities in the real world in relation to cognitive changes in older age. Conversational contexts may mitigate the influence of cognitive aging on the cognitive activity of language production. This study examined effects of familiarity with interlocutors, as a...

Background: Reminiscence is the act of thinking or talking about personal experiences that occurred in the past. It is a central task of old age that is essential for healthy aging, and it serves multiple functions, such as decision-making and introspection, transmitting life lessons, and bonding with others. The study of social reminiscence behav...

BACKGROUND Reminiscence is the act of thinking or talking about personal experiences, which occurred in the past. It is a central task of old age serving multiple functions, such as supporting decision-making and introspection, facilitating the transmission of life lessons, as well as bonding with others. The study of social reminiscence behavior i...

Objectives: This study investigated linear and non-linear age effects on language use with speech samples that were representative of naturally occurring conversations. Method: Using a corpus-based approach, we examined couples' conflict conversations in the laboratory. The conversations, from a total of 364 community dwelling German-speaking he...

Poster available from here: https://osf.io/h8ypt/

Age-related differences in white matter (WM) microstructure have been linked to lower performance in tasks of processing speed in healthy older individuals. However, only few studies have examined this link in a longitudinal setting. These investigations have been limited to the correlation of simultaneous changes in WM microstructure and processin...

Der Beitrag zeigt die Erfordernisse und Konsequenzen der Umsetzung des modernen Konzept des gesunden Alterns (WHO, 2015) für die Schweiz auf.

Background In gerontological research, older people are often used as test subjects. Participatory research means the active and equal involvement of those affected by the research question, i.e., the subjects and the academic researchers. But what is the interest in participatory research among older people who participate in an educational instit...

Correlations between observed data are at the heart of all empirical research that strives for establishing lawful regularities. However, there are numerous ways to assess these correlations, and there are numerous ways to make sense of them. This essay presents a bird’s eye perspective on different interpretive schemes to understand correlations....

Background: Assisted dying and continuous deep sedation (CDS) are controversial practices. Little is known about the perceptions of physicians and surrogates about these practices for patients with advanced dementia. Objectives: To describe and compare physician and surrogate agreement with the use of assisted dying and CDS in advanced dementia....

Objectives: We examined older adults' social reminiscence behavior in everyday life, and the relation between reminiscence functions and well-being. Method: The sample included 2,164 sound snippets that included speech from 45 healthy older adults. We examined reminiscence in daily conversations using the Electronically Activated Recorder. Acros...

This study examined age effects on real-life language use and within-person variations in language use across social contexts. We used the Electronically Activated Recorder (i.e., a portable audio recorder that periodically records sound snippets) to collect over 31,300 snippets (30 seconds long) from 61 young and 48 healthy older adults in Switzer...

Amid the growing interest in studying language use in real life, this study, for the first time, examined age effects on real-life language use, as well as within-person variations across different interlocutors. We examined speech samples collected via the Electronically Activated Recorder (i.e., portable audio recorder that periodically records a...

Objective: Handgrip strength, an indicator of overall muscle strength, has been found to be associated with slower rate of cognitive decline and decreased risk for cognitive impairment and dementia. However, evaluating the replicability of associations between aging-related changes in physical and cognitive functioning is challenging due to differ...

Little is still known about the neuroanatomical substrates related to changes in specific cognitive abilities in the course of healthy aging, and the existing evidence is predominantly based on cross-sectional studies. However, to understand the intricate dynamics between developmental changes in brain structure and changes in cognitive ability, lo...

Objectives: An engaged lifestyle has been linked to measures of functional ability in everyday life. However, the underlying mechanism of this link is still understudied. We propose working memory as a potential mediator of this relation. Method: Modelling data of 158 older adults with a latent-variables approach, we examined whether working mem...

Coding in social sciences is a process that involves the categorisation of qualitative or quantitative data in order to facilitate further analysis. Coding is usually a manual process that involves a lot of effort and time to produce codes with high validity and interrater reliability. Although automated methods for quantitative data analysis are l...

In this manual, we introduce a new version of the German adaptation of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), called the DE-LIWC2015. The aim of the present work was to develop an update to the previous version of the German LIWC adaptation (Wolf et al., 2008) that corresponds to the LIWC2015 properties. The overall goal was to enable automa...

Research on cognitive aging demonstrates age-related cognitive decline. Education is a protective factor against cognitive decline, but few studies have examined the cognitive development of highly educated individuals. This study compared the cognitive performance and intellectual engagement of retired professors (N = 47, Mage = 72.9) and individu...

We examined mental time travel reflected onto individuals’ utterances in real-life conversations using a naturalistic observation method: Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR, a portable audio recorder that periodically and unobtrusively records snippets of ambient sounds and speech). We introduced the term conversational time travel and examined...

Late life development is characterized by multidirectional trajectories of change and stability in psychological functioning. Little is known, however, about how healthy older adults in fact structure their daily lives in terms of the activities carried out. The Mobility, Activity and Social Interactions Study (MOASIS) uses a custom-built single mo...

Negative and positive conflict communication predicts long-term relationship satisfaction. However, some studies show harmful effects and others show beneficial effects of negative conflict communication on long-term relationship satisfaction. One reason for the heterogeneous results might be that most studies focused on aggregated behaviors across...

As real-life activity data from many aging individuals become available, insights gleaned from such data could be leveraged to foster healthy aging. The emerging field of semantic activity analytics is addressing this challenge.

Background: fact Boxes are decision support tools that can inform about treatment effects. Objectives: to test whether Fact Box decision support tools impacted decisional conflict, knowledge and preferences about the use of antibiotics and artificial hydration in advanced dementia. Design: randomized controlled trial. Setting: Swiss-German r...

Im Kapitel werden die wichtigsten entwicklungsregulativen Theorien besprochen, die übergeordnete Mechanismen der Entwicklung im Umgang mit Ressourcenveränderungen beschreiben. Zudem werden aktuelle Entwicklungen der Alternsforschung beleuchtet wie die Fokussierung auf Stabilisierungsprozesse, die Benutzung alltagsnaher objektiver Mess- und Analysev...

In 10 volumes, jointly developed by relatives, practitioners, and researchers, information and guidance for relatives of persons with dementia at the end of life. 10 volumes on (1) Quality of life, (2) communication, (3) eating and drinking, (4) Health, (5) challenging behaviors, (6) spirituality, (7) legal and financial issues, (8) dying, (9) work...

The 10 year anniversary of the COGITO Study provides an opportunity to revisit the ideas behind the Cattell data box. Three dimensions of the persons × variables × time data box are discussed in the context of three categories of researchers each wanting to answer their own categorically different question. The example of the well-known speed-accur...

Background: The International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM) was founded in 2012 to propose consensus-based measurement tools and documentation for different conditions and populations.This article describes how the ICHOM Older Person Working Group followed a consensus-driven modified Delphi technique to develop multiple global...

This study explored the use of wearable devices to track self-recorded health data and the willingness to share this data with re- searchers. Participants aged ≥ 50 years (n = 1,013) were interviewed in a representative telephone survey. Results indicated that 43.3% of all participants used one or more mobile devices (activity tracker, smartwatch,...

Background: Dementia impairs spatial orientation and route planning, thus often affecting the patient’s ability to move outdoors and maintain social activities. Situation-aware deliberative assistive technology devices (ATD) can substitute impaired cognitive function in order to maintain one’s level of social activity. To build such system one need...

Reliability of cognitive ability domain measures.

The current study (N = 236) examined stability and change of six cognitive abilities and three personality traits in old age (M = 74.12 years, SD = 4.40) over four years. Furthermore, we investigated whether levels of one domain were related to the other domain (and vice versa) four years later. The results showed a mean–level decline for processin...

This technical report contains the documentation of an ontology for the outdoor mobility of people with dementia (PwD). The ontology serves two purposes: (a) as a knowledge base from which to build an assistive technology device describing the mobility of PwD (we call this a situation model); (b) as a codebook for the annotation of the recorded beh...

Therapeutic decision-making for patients with multimorbidity (MM) is challenging. Clinical practice guidelines inadequately address harmful interactions and resulting therapeutic conflicts within and among diseases. A patient-specific measure of MM severity that takes account of this conflict is needed. As a proof of concept, we evaluated whether t...

Studies attempting to improve episodic memory performance with strategy instructions and training have had limited success in older adults: their training gains are limited in comparison to those of younger adults and do not generalize to untrained tasks and contexts. This limited success has been partly attributed to age-related impairments in ass...

. Research on aging in different domains largely focuses on age-related decrements or intervention-related improvements, often in controlled laboratory conditions or with psychometric tests of maximum ability or traits. This special issue on monitoring and promoting old-age health stabilization in real life focuses on the short-term and long-term a...

Objective: To test the efficacy of a tablet computer training intervention to improve cognitive abilities of older adults. Design: Prospective randomized controlled trial. Setting: Community-based aging intervention study, Edinburgh, UK. Participants: Forty-eight healthy older adults aged 65 to 76 years were recruited at baseline with no or...

Normal aging is generally associated with deterioration in a number of cognitive abilities, although large individual differences in size and progression of age-related cognitive change exist. Cognitive training interventions have become an increasingly important object of research, aiming at the stabilization and improvement of cognitive abilities...

A substantial part of age-related episodic memory decline has been attributed to the decreasing ability of older adults to encode and retrieve associations among simultaneously processed information units from long-term memory. In addition, this ability seems to share unique variance with reasoning. In this study, we therefore examined whether proc...

Background The proportion of older people with advanced dementia who will die in nursing homes is constantly growing. However, little is known about the dying phase, the type of symptoms, the management of symptoms and the quality of life and dying in people with advanced dementia. The ZULIDAD (Zurich Life and Death with Advanced Dementia) study ai...

Background: In demanding cognitive tasks, older people mostly experience more problems than younger people, and their brain workload is higher. An overloaded or exhausted mental workload is frequently associated with unsafe driving behavior. In this paper, we hypothesize that 10 active training sessions in a driving simulator positively influence...

Multi-domain training potentially increases the likelihood of overlap in processing components with transfer tasks and everyday life, and hence is a promising training approach for older adults. To empirically test this, 84 healthy older adults aged 64 to 75 years were randomly assigned to one of three single-domain training conditions (inhibition,...

Es wird ein aktuelles Paradigma der standardisierbaren Evidenzgewinnung für individualisierte gerontologische Interventionen skizziert. Dieses steht in Einklang mit der aktuellen Definition des "healthy aging" der WHO (2015).

Conflict communication represents a basic process for the quality of intimate relationships, which is fundamental to well-being over the lifespan. This study investigates the temporal unfolding of different relational perspectives during a conflict situation by monitoring pronoun use in young, middle-aged, and old couples within the theoretical fra...

Correlated change in personality is essential to understanding change and development. It refers to the question of whether and to what degree changes in personality are interrelated over time within and between individuals. Compared to the longstanding literature on personality development, relatively less research has focused on correlated change...

Conflict communication represents a basic process for the quality of intimate relationships, which is fundamental to well-being over the lifespan. This study investigates the temporal unfolding of different relational perspectives during a conflict situation by monitoring pronoun use in young, middle-aged, and old couples within the theoretical fra...

- Einführung - Gründe für die Anwendung partizipativer Forschungsmethoden - Diskussion - Fazit und Ausblick - Literatur

Multi-domain training potentially increases the likelihood of overlap in processing components with transfer tasks and everyday life, and hence is a promising training approach for older adults. To empirically test this, 84 healthy older adults aged 64 to 75 years were randomly assigned to one of three single-domain training conditions (inhibition,...

Finding effective training interventions for declining cognitive abilities in healthy aging is of great relevance, especially in view of the demographic development. Since it is assumed that transfer from the trained to untrained domains is more likely to occur when training conditions and transfer measures share a common underlying process, multi-...

The current study investigated discrepancies in self-, partner-, and meta-perceptions of the Big Five traits and their associations with relationship satisfaction in intimate couples. The study was based on a subsample of the Swiss study "Co-Development in Personality: Longitudinal Approaches to Personality Development in Dyads Across the Life Span...

Avoidance goals heighten the salience of negative social experiences, and in intimate relationships such an orientation may contribute to communication difficulties and the perpetuation of avoidance. We therefore hypothesized that individuals with stronger avoidance goals would be particularly prone to engage in escalating levels of negative commun...

This study investigated long-term correlated change between personality traits and perceived social support in middle adulthood. Two measurement occasions with an 8-year time interval from the Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study on Adult Development (ILSE) were used. The sample consisted of 346 middle-aged adults (46-50 years at T1). Four differen...

Abstract Current health-psychological theories and research mainly cover improvement of health, recovery from illness or maintenance of health. With this theoretical manuscript, we argue that in ageing societies in which chronic illness and multimorbidity become the norm rather than the exception, this focus of health psychology is no longer suffic...

Cognitive development in ageing is a multidimensional and multidirectional phenomenon characterized by age-related changes in the plasticity of different dimensions of cognitive functions. Gains, stability, and losses can be observed across abilities and across persons as they age. Although with the closeness to death losses are predominant, severa...

The present study addresses the issue of age differences in five personality domains across the lifespan in a cross-sectional study. In contrast to most previous studies, we followed a methodologically more rigorous approach to warrant that age-related differences in personality structure and mean-level can be meaningfully compared. We used data on...

Background: Age-related cognitive decline is often associated with unsafe driving behavior. We hypothesized that 10 active training sessions in a driving simulator increase cognitive and on-road driving performance. In addition, driving simulator training should outperform cognitive training. Methods: Ninety-one healthy active drivers (62–87 years)...