Synonyms

Aging in different cultures; Cross-cultural differences in aging

Definition

In the current entry, cross-cultural aging is defined as cultural differences in aging of human psychology, including cognitive aging, socio-cognitive aging, and socio-emotional aging. The scope of cultural difference in the extant literature focuses mainly on comparison between East Asian and Western (North American and Western European) cultures.

Introduction

Population aging is a worldwide phenomenon. This entry provides an overview of extant research on how age differences in cognition, affect, and behavior vary across cultures. While this inquiry is driven by the need for science to understand the relative contributions of culture in explaining the impact of aging on human psychology, it also underscores the importance of recognizing the role of culture, in a world growing in its awareness of cultural diversity. The contents of this entry are thematically organized into cognitive aging, socio-cognitive aging, and socio-emotional aging with a focus on differences between Eastern (typically East Asian) and Western (typically North American) cultures.

Age Differences in Cognition Across Cultures

Cognition has long been theorized to comprise two components: one is the biologically based hardware of basic cognitive functions, supporting speed of processing and working memory, for example, and the other is the culturally based software of cognitive functions, supporting language and decision-making. These components of cognitive functions have also been characterized as fluid and crystallized intelligence, cognitive mechanics, and cognitive pragmatics, as well as primary and secondary processes.

This division provides a possible framework to understand cultural differences in age-related cognition. Specifically, biologically based hardware of basic cognitive functions declines with age and does so equivalently across cultures, whereas culturally based software of cognitive functions could be cultivated by culture and be more resistant to the effects of aging (Park et al. 1999). According to this view, few cultural differences would be detected in the hardware of cognition in either younger or older adults. In contrast, one might expect more profound cultural differences in the life-span developmental trajectory of the software of cognition.

Recent evidence, however, suggests that culture also moderates the aging of the hardware of cognitive processes (Park et al. 1999). For instance, Hedden and colleagues found superior performance in Chinese versus American younger adults on auditory digit span task (a working memory measure), but no difference in Chinese and American older adults (Hedden et al. 2002). Park et al. posited that culture might bias people at the very beginning phase of cognitive encoding to attend to certain types of information at the expense of other information (e.g., context-object bias). This, in turn, has a major influence on follow-up cognitive processes of the selected information (including those that were once thought of as basic processes) (Park et al. 1999). Therefore, cultural differences in cognitive aging may not neatly follow the dichotomous characterization of cognitive processes.

To better comprehend the interplay of age and culture in cognition, Park, Nisbett, and Hedden developed a new theoretical framework, based on a distinction between culture-invariant and culture-saturated cognitive tasks and measures (Park et al. 1999). These authors asserted that the effects of culture and age on cognition were task dependent. On culture-invariant cognitive tasks, individuals from different cultures would perform similarly, and age-related declines on the tasks would happen at an equivalent rate across cultures. On culture-saturated cognitive tasks, however, individuals’ performance would vary as a function of culture. Specifically, cultural differences would increase with age if the differences are based on automatically activated processes and would decrease (termed as cultural convergence) with age if they are based on effortful, strategic cognitive processes. Accordingly, age-related cultural convergence could result from the leveling effects of biologically based functional declines on basic cognitive processes, influencing one’s cognitive resources. On a resource-demanding task, older adults would have insufficient resources to support flexible use of strategies, resulting in cross-culturally equivalent task performance.

According to Park et al.’s framework, culture is more likely to interplay with age on culture-saturated than on culture-invariant cognitive tasks and measures. To understand this influence, it is necessary to identify culture-saturated cognitive measures and then discuss the interaction effects of culture and age on these measures.

Holistic-Analytic Thinking

Previous literature has well documented a preference for holistic thinking in collectivistic Eastern cultures and a preference for analytic thinking in individualistic Western cultures. Individuals with holistic thinking tend to attend to contextual information, emphasize relationships and group functions, make relatively little use of natural categories, and rely on intuitive, dialectical reasoning. Individuals with analytic thinking, however, attend to objects, emphasize individual functions, readily make use of categorical information, and rely on rational, logical reasoning (Masuda et al. 2008).

Context-Object Bias

The cultural divergence on holistic-analytic thinking results in different attentional biases in Easterners and Westerners. Easterners normally pay greater attention to contextual information (e.g., a picture’s background) and tend to bind context and object together, whereas Westerners normally pay greater attention to objects, even when they are embedded in the background (Masuda et al. 2008).

Cultural differences in context-object bias have been found to diminish with age. For example, some studies find that younger East Asians are more sensitive to the context of facial expressions than younger North Americans. However, this cultural discrepancy disappeared in older adults (Ko et al. 2011; Masuda et al. 2008). The results of these studies are consistent with Park et al.’s framework in which they assert that cultural differences in cognition could decrease with age on tasks that require effortful and controlled processing. In these studies, it was highly resource consuming to integrate contextual and facial information, making both Asian and American older adults unable to complete the tasks well and leading to age-related cultural convergence (Park et al. 1999).

Categorical Processing of Information

The divergence on holistic-analytical thinking also leads to differences in categorization strategies used by Easterners and Westerners. First, Easterners typically make less use of natural categories compared to Westerners when categories are not highly salient. Second, Easterners use more thematic categorization, whereas Westerners use more taxonomic categorization when categories are salient enough to be accessed (Park et al. 1999). Taxonomic information refers to similarity of features and attributes among objects, whereas thematic information refers to causal, spatial, and temporal relationships among objects (Ji et al. 2004). For example, in the “chicken-cow-grass” test (Chiu 1972), Westerners tend to pair the chicken and cow together due to their shared taxonomic similarity (i.e., both are animals), while Easterners tend to categorize the cow and grass together due to their functional relationship (i.e., cows eat grass).

These cultural differences in processing of categorical information become amplified with age. For example, cultural differences in memorizing categorical information are larger among older than younger adults, and the age-related decline in memorizing categorical information is more pronounced in Eastern versus Western cultures (Gutchess et al. 2006; Yang et al. 2013). These interaction effects could be interpreted within Park et al.’s framework. Specifically, limitations in cognitive resources make it increasingly difficult for older Easterners to employ an unfamiliar strategy (i.e., categorization), and therefore Easterners may suffer more severe age-related loss in using categories. In contrast, cultural preferences and prolonged experience make it less resource demanding for older Westerners to categorize, and therefore their age-related decline in category processing may be reduced (Gutchess et al. 2006).

In short, divergent thinking styles make people from Eastern and Western cultures process information differently. The cultural differences in cognition are especially evident in measures of context-object bias and categorical processing of information – all of which appear to be readily accounted by Park et al.’s theoretical framework of the interaction between age and culture on cognition.

Age Differences in Social Cognition Across Cultures

Attributions of Social Behavior

A well-established finding in social psychology is errors of attribution error. People tend to explain causal relationships in terms of dispositional (e.g., personality traits), rather than situational forces (e.g., social pressure). This bias manifests as the correspondence bias, which refers to one’s lack of awareness of situational constraints, leading to insufficient correction for these constraints when making dispositional inferences.

Besides social psychologists, life-span psychologists have also focused on social attributions in the context of aging. With an American sample, Blanchard-Fields and Horhota (Blanchard-Fields and Horhota 2005) found that older and middle-aged adults displayed the correspondence bias to a greater extent than did younger adults (Blanchard-Fields and Horhota 2005). The difference between older and younger adults was eliminated only when a plausible motive (but not other situational constraints) for the actor’s behavior was made salient. The researchers attributed this finding to cognitive decline and insufficient motivation of older adults to consider the situation faced by the actor if they were not prompted to consider the actors’ plausible motives.

The cross-cultural difference in susceptibility to the correspondence bias is well established. People from relatively individualistic cultures, such as the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, are more susceptible to this bias than people from relatively collectivistic cultures, such as East Asian countries including Japan, Korea, and China. This tendency is chiefly explained in terms of East Asians’ subscription to the holism – the notion that nothing is isolated and everything is connected and their tendency to take constraints faced by individuals – imposed by the social collectives and situational contexts they are embedded in into account (Nisbett et al. 2001). Blanchard-Fields, Chen, Horhota, and Wang inquired into cultural differences in correspondence bias at different ages by comparing adults from two age groups, younger and older, in two cultures, American and Chinese (Ko et al. 2011). In addition to finding a cultural difference (the Americans showed stronger correspondence bias than the Chinese regardless of age group), they found that this cultural difference was affected by age – older Americans demonstrated a stronger correspondence bias than younger Americans (replicating prior findings), whereas older Chinese showed a weaker bias, albeit statistically insignificant, than younger Chinese (Blanchard-Fields et al. 2007). The researchers suggest that age-related changes in susceptibility to the correspondence bias are not driven by decline in cognitive processing capacity but rather by “lifelong accumulation of cultural experience,” which helps older adults to “internalize cultural-specific models of attribution.”

Implicit Theories and Their Consequences: Dialecticism and Holism

Another psychological domain investigating the effects of culture on age concerns the lay theory of naive dialecticism (often simply referred to as dialecticism). Naive dialecticism is a “constellation of lay beliefs about the nature of world” whose roots can be traced to folk Taoism, with influences from Buddhist thoughts (Spencer-Rodgers et al. 2009). The beliefs related to naive dialecticism revolve around three themes: that everything is related to one another (holism), that change is cyclical, and that we should be tolerant of contradiction. These themes are endorsed by members of a number of East Asian cultures, including Japan, China, and Korea. Dialecticism influences cognition, affect, and behavior in a number of ways. For example, members of dialectical cultures are more likely to prefer dialectical proverbs to nondialectical proverbs, reason more dialectically about social contradictions, and perceive emotions of opposite valence as compatible with each other (Spencer-Rodgers et al. 2009).

As the culture-specific influence of dialectical beliefs on emotional experience and well-being across the life-span will be covered in another entry, this section will focus on how dialecticism influences self-concept and cognitive-behavioral tendencies in older adults. Zhang and his colleagues examined age-related changes in dialecticism (and its close conceptual counterpart, holism) cross-culturally (Zhang et al. 2014). Comparing younger and older adults in Hong Kong and America, they found distinct age-related changes in self-reported dialecticism and a behavioral measure of holism, the framed-line test (FLT). Specifically, while older people reported being less dialectical than younger people in both cultures, only Chinese older adults, not their American counterparts, exhibited stronger holistic tendencies on the behavioral measure of holism, the FLT. These findings suggest a potential for the influence of culturally endorsed implicit theories to grow with age, but such growth is likely to be domain specific.

Age-Related Changes in Personality Across Cultures

Personality is characterized by habitual patterns in behavior, thought, and emotion. This section reviews some models of personality and examines their manifestation in younger and older age groups in different cultures.

Big Five and Indigenous Models of Personality

Often regarded as the most influential model of personality, the five-factor model (FFM) has been supported in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies in multiple cultures (McCrae et al. 1999). The model comprises five dimensions of personality – extraversion, openness to experience, neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Evidence further suggests that, across cultures, older people are more conscientious, more agreeable, less neurotic, less open to experiences, and less extraverted than younger people (McCrae et al. 1999).

However, some personality psychologists have argued that the FFM is culturally biased and is insufficient when it comes to explaining personality variability in cultures outside of North America and Western Europe. This sentiment has spurred an emic (indigenous) approach to the study of personality. In China, this has resulted in the development of the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI) (Cheung et al. 2001), which argues that a sixth personality construct, interpersonal relatedness, should be added to increase its relevance to the Chinese context. Interpersonal relatedness comprises harmony (avoidance of interpersonal conflict), Ren Qing (abiding by the rules of social exchange), face (concern of others’ opinion of oneself), and flexibility (seeing others’ views or methods). Notably, these CPAI personality factors, which include interpersonal relatedness, replicate fairly well in European American populations, hence supporting the CPAI applicability in cross-cultural personality research (Lin and Church 2004).

Interestingly, when measured across the life-span, changes in interpersonal relatedness showed cross-cultural variation. Fung and Ng found that interpersonal relatedness is higher among older Chinese than younger Chinese, but this age difference is not found among European Canadians (Fung and Ng 2006). This suggests that Chinese exhibit culturally valued norms and traits more strongly as they age. The same trend is also observed in the domain of dispositional optimism: Americans (who live in a culture that value optimism) become more optimistic with age, whereas Hong Kong Chinese (who live a in a culture that value optimism considerably less) become less optimistic with age (You et al. 2009).

Collectivistic and Individualistic Tendencies

Research on personality development across the life-span using nonfactor-based approaches has corroborated the aforementioned finding that age-related differences in personality across the life-span can vary among cultures. In Labouvie-Vief, Diehl, Tarnowski, and Shen’s exploratory study, they examined how 20 “folk concept” scales of personality – taken from the California Psychological Inventory – changed over the life-span in Americans and Mainland Chinese (Labouvie-Vief et al. 2000). They discovered that older Chinese, compared to younger Chinese, expressed increases in self-control and good impression, together with a reduction in self-acceptance and flexibility. These results suggest that “collectivistic tendencies,” which are related to norm orientation, are stronger among older Chinese, whereas “individualistic tendencies,” characterizing extraversion and individual initiative, are weaker among older Chinese, compared to younger Chinese. In general, the age-related patterns found in the Chinese sample are either absent or less pronounced in the American sample.

Taken together, findings from these cross-cultural studies suggest that aging can strengthen the endorsement and expression of traits and characteristics valued in one’s culture (e.g., social reciprocity and collectivistic tendencies in the Chinese culture and optimism and individualistic tendencies in the American culture).

Age-Related Gains in Wisdom Across Cultures

Most cultures tend to agree that we gain wisdom as we age, though recent evidence shows that age-related gains in different aspects of wisdom vary as a function of culture. With three age groups (younger adults, middle-aged adults, and older adults), Grossmann and his colleagues examined wise reasoning (e.g., acknowledging multiple perspectives, recognizing likelihood of change, perceiving flexibility in conflict development) about interpersonal and intergroup conflicts in Japanese and Americans aged 25–75 years (Grossmann et al. 2012). They found that younger and middle-aged Japanese, compared to their American counterparts, showed greater use of wise reasoning strategies only for reasoning about interpersonal conflicts, but not for intergroup conflicts, and this cultural difference did not extend into old age. In terms of intergroup conflicts, while Japanese and Americans started out at a similar level of intergroup wisdom at a younger age, only Americans exhibited age-related growth in this type of wisdom. The findings were interpreted as evidence for interpersonal wisdom to emerge at a younger age among Japanese than Americans, due to the relevance of wise reasoning to keeping harmonious relationships with others. Conversely, age-related growth in wise reasoning about intergroup conflicts is only observed in America. This may be because of the United States’ relatively higher ethnic diversity that calls for wisdom in the intergroup domain. This finding suggests that although wisdom is a psychological quality that shows age-related growth across cultures, the trajectory of the growth is influenced by domain-specific importance of different types of wisdom in each culture.

Age Differences in Emotion and Well-Being Across Cultures

Emotion Perception

As people grow older, they tend to show preference for processing positive information rather than negative or neutral information. This effect was coined as “positivity effect” (Charles et al. 2003). For example, Charles and colleagues found that, while young participants demonstrated a negativity dominance during memory tasks (remember negative images better), such an effect was less pronounced among older adults, suggesting a reduction in negativity with increasing age. However, recent cross-culture studies suggest that this aging-related positivity effect might not be universal. In Western cultures, positive information is perceived as more emotionally useful because it helps individuals maintain optimism and self-esteem, which in turn fulfills culturally endorsed values of autonomy and uniqueness. In East Asian cultures, social harmony and interpersonal relationships are more important than individual uniqueness or autonomy. Thus, to maintain social harmony and avoid social mistakes, individuals may pay attention to different social cues from the environment, including both positive and negative information, and then provide appropriate responses accordingly. Hence, in these cultures, negative information may not be perceived as less important as positive information. This may, in turn, lead to a cultural difference in the aging-related positivity effect, such that the bias for processing positivity is not generalized to interdependent cultures.

Evidence showing this cultural difference comes largely from comparisons of Western and the Hong Kong Chinese cultures – studies conducted in Korea demonstrated the same age-related positivity bias as in Western cultures (Ko et al. 2011). For example, Fung and her colleagues found that, although older participants remembered positive information better than neutral information (positivity enhance effect), they also remembered negative images as well as the neutral images (no negativity reduction effect) (Fung 2013). In another study, older adults recognized an announcement that conveyed negative emotions better than an announcement that conveyed neutral emotions. Using eye tracking methodology, Fung and colleagues demonstrated that Chinese older participants looked away from positive stimuli (Fung 2013).

Later, Fung and colleagues tested whether the cultural value of interdependence held by individuals moderated the age-related bias for positive information (Fung 2013). In both studies with memory tasks and attention tasks, results suggested that the age difference in negativity reduction effect was only observed among participants with lower levels of interdependence, similar to the result that has been demonstrated by Western samples. Yet, among Chinese participants with higher level of interdependence, no age difference was found.

To summarize, accumulated evidence has demonstrated the cultural variation in age-related positivity effect. Individuals from Chinese culture, who value interdependence more than Western individuals, may not regard negative information as more important than positive information and thus exhibit the age-related positivity effect to a lesser extent.

Emotional Experience and Well-Being

In the Western literature, previous findings have demonstrated that older people exhibit a higher level of emotional well-being (more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions) compared to their younger counterparts (Shiota and Levenson 2009). The same pattern was found in the Chinese culture. Pethtel and Chen compared the emotional experience among a group of Mainland Chinese participants and found that older adults reported lower levels of negative emotions than did younger adults (Pethtel and Chen 2010). However, some recent studies observed a different pattern in other Asian cultures. Grossman and colleagues argued that although emotional well-being might be a universal goal, the way to achieve it might vary across cultures (Grossmann et al. 2014). In Western cultures, well-being might be enhanced by experiencing more positivity and less negativity, and research shows that this is what Westerners tend to pursue, being more strongly motivated to maximize their positive emotional feelings and minimize negative one. However, in East Asian cultures that encourage tolerance for contradictions and changes, well-being is defined by a dialectical way of mixing positive and negative experience. Based on this dialectical belief, maintaining positive feelings and avoiding negative feelings may become less important for East Asians; they might instead prefer to strive for a balance between the positive and negative (Grossmann et al. 2014). Indeed, in Grossman’s study, older Japanese participants reported a higher level of positive emotions than did their younger counterparts. Yet they reported the same level of negativity as did their younger counterparts, including the intensity of negative emotions, the focus on past negative experience, and the proportion of perceived negative interpersonal relationships. In another study conducted in Hong Kong, a similar pattern was found, such that age was associated with more positive emotions, but there was no correlation between age and negative emotions (Yeung et al. 2011).

In summary, in both Western and Eastern cultures, aging correlates with an increase in positive emotions, while a decrease in negative emotions is more frequently observed in Western cultures.

Emotional Regulation

As outlined above, older people tend to report higher emotional well-being. Urry and Gross proposed that the underlying mechanism might be that older adults become better at regulating their emotions (Urry and Gross 2010). More specifically, to regulate emotions, older adults may tend to employ antecedent-focused strategies (e.g., cognitive reappraisal, attentional deployment) more than response-focused strategies (e.g., expression suppression) (Carstensen et al. 1999). The former is also associated with healthier outcomes. For example, as abovementioned, compared to younger adults, older adults pay more attention to positive information and stimuli, suggesting they tend to use the strategy of attentional deployment. Given that the antecedent-focused strategies downregulate the negative emotions before they are full-blown, preventing individuals from negative and stressful experience, they tend to be associated with healthier outcomes.

Cross-culturally, age differences in emotion regulation only partially hold true in East Asian cultures. During the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong, Yeung and Fung found that compared to young participants, older participants reported more emotional-focus coping and lower levels of anger both at the peak of the SARS epidemic and at its end, suggesting that older people were more successful in managing their negative emotions under stressful situations (Yeung and Fung 2007). In another study conducted in Hong Kong, Yeung and colleagues found that an age-related increase in using cognitive reappraisal partially accounted for the age differences in positive feelings (Yeung et al. 2011). These data support the hypothesis that older people are better at antecedent-focused emotion regulation.

However, in the same study, no age difference in suppression was found. Yeung and colleagues speculated that because Asian cultures emphasized interpersonal harmony, suppressing one’s emotions to avoid social conflict was always encouraged across different life periods (Yeung et al. 2011). Hence, older adults exhibited the same level of suppression as younger adults. In another study, older adults benefited from suppressing emotion. This emotional suppression was positively correlated with a lower intensity of negative emotion and better work performance among older adults but not younger adults (Yeung and Fung 2012).

Interestingly, although most of the aforementioned evidence suggests that older adults tend to control their emotions to preserve their social relationships, a study found that in Mainland China, where the hierarchy within family was emphasized, older adults were more likely to express anger to their kin to preserve their authority in the family hierarchy (Fung and You 2011).

Conclusion

This entry provides an overview of how age-related changes in cognition, affect, and behavior vary as a function of culture. It should be acknowledged that most “cross-cultural” comparisons reported in this entry are mostly “East versus West” comparisons – in other words, imprecise depictions of the rich cultural diversity in our world. This bias in current research on culture should be an inspiration for researchers to broaden the scope of inquiry of age differences into cultures that are, at present, underrepresented. Similarly, most of the reported studies are cross-sectional (reflecting existing aging research in general), and their conclusions may be confounded by cohort effects. Despite these limitations, our review suggests that aging does take different forms, or at least manifest in different ways, in some domains across cultures. Examining the intersection of aging and culture may reveal important mechanisms about adult development.

Cross-References