Susan T. Charles's research while affiliated with University of California, Irvine and other places

... Multiple studies reported no age-related change of control beliefsi.e., high normative mean level stabilityin midlife; for example, three studies that examined unidimensional measures of control beliefs (<30-75 years at baseline across 20 years, Cerino et al., 2024;40-85 years at baseline across 15 years, Drewelies et al., 2017;18-95 years at baseline across a 6 years, Mirowsky & Ross, 2007), as well as a study examining specific measures of (internal) personal control and powerful others (19-79 years old participants, Ryckman & Malikiosi, 1975) in a cross-sectional study. However, there is evidence to suggest that age trajectories of beliefs about internal control (over positive and negative outcomes) and external control (of powerful others or chance) might differ across midlife. ...

... Activity diversity denotes the variety of activity types that people engage in during a particular time frame. It has been shown that activity diversity is associated with higher cognitive functioning (Brown et al., 2023), more agreeable personality states (Lindner et al., 2023), and lower likelihood to develop frailty (Takahashi et al., 2023) and depression (H.-Y. . Does a lifestyle characterized by diversity also foster well-being, one of the key indicators of healthy aging (World Health Organization, 2015)? ...

... Yet, older adults may also benefit from experience-based strengths in emotion regulation (Charles & Luong, 2013). For example, older and younger adults' NA did not differ after a stressor but older adults recovered faster (Minton et al., 2023;Scott et al., 2017). High-and lowarousal NA may also serve different functions that could be differentially adaptive for younger and older adults. ...

... The finding that, relative to older adults, younger adults rate middle and older ages more similarly is consistent with the idea that older adults hold more nuanced conceptions of adulthood than younger adults (e.g., Heckhausen et al., 1989), possibly because their ratings are informed by personal experiences. For example, having experienced middle-age, older adults may be aware of several positive aspects of these ages, including the fact that some abilities peak, such as some aspects of cognition (Hartshorne & Germine, 2015), emotional well-being (Carstensen et al., 2000(Carstensen et al., , 2011Charles et al., 2023;Riediger et al., 2009), and interpersonal reasoning (Castel, 2018;Grossmann et al., 2010;Jeste & Oswald, 2014). Instead, younger adults may rely on stereotypes to evaluate ages they have yet to experience. ...

... Among older adults, those of more advanced age reduce their engagement in physical, social, and cognitive activities more than those of relatively younger age (Buchman et al., 2014;Finkel et al., 2018). Further, older adults with more functional limitations engage in fewer leisure activities (Janke et al., 2006) and had lower activity diversity (S. Lee, Ng, et al., 2022). Thus, older age and lower health status may encourage older adults to adapt their behaviours, being more selective in their daily activities and devoting more time on fewer rather than more diverse activities. ...

... Researchers posit that as people age, they become increasingly skilled at regulating their emotions by proactively avoiding stressors (Charles, 2010); in addition, people may increasingly seek to maximize pleasant experiences and suppress unpleasant and ambivalent feelings to maintain subjective well-being. Although older adults may be more adept at avoiding the presence of stressors, they may not be better at regulating the high levels of distress that stressors elicit (Almeida et al., 2023). ...

... Previously, anxiety was mentioned having been found to be a risk factor for reporting decline in mental health due to the COVID-19 pandemic, other such risk factors found in Paper III were a negative change in social life, experiencing a bad family situation, and a change in physical activity. All of which are known to influence mental health (213)(214)(215), and, thus, expected, as was female gender, the final risk factor found in Paper III. Women are in general more susceptible to psychological distress than men, also in the older population (216,217). In general, women reported lower quality of life, and higher scores for anxiety, depression, and stress than men in the HOLD-study. ...

... Cognitive functioning, understood as a person's abilities for acquiring and processing information, reasoning and decision-making, is key for daily functioning (Jeon et al., 2022). Cognitive decline can negatively impact the ability to perform everyday tasks, implying a loss of independence and quality of life (Thorvaldsson et al., 2016). ...

... The literature revealed that low income, higher deprivation levels, a low level of education, and high-risk behaviour scores were associated with higher levels of physical and mental health conditions. 4e9, 14,15 Strong associations between high deprivation levels and increased physical and mental health conditions were further established in previous studies. 8,9 In an exploratory procedure, all relationships identified in the literature were tested using data from the CLiK survey to verify the existence of uncontrolled relationships in the study sample. ...

... Furthermore, all other included studies employed EE interventions that featured structural elements with different shapes, functions and colors, further highlighting the importance of the diversity of the available enrichment items, in addition to change of enrichment items across time. Last but not least, we have evidence from a study conducted on humans that higher diversity of activities leads to greater hippocampal volumes across both hemispheres (Urban-Wojcik et al., 2022). ...