Collaborative Everyday Problem Solving: Gain or Loss?

该项目旨在通过对认知的研究来了解健康的衰老过程。根据NIA行为与社会研究（BSR）项目的使命声明，本研究的长期目标是确定社会环境如何影响认知发展。特别感兴趣的是个人如何利用自己的能力和人际关系来成功地解决日常生活和年龄问题。这个项目是了解社会环境如何塑造认知的一步，目的是比较单独工作与与熟悉的社会伙伴合作对年轻人和老年人解决人际关系和工具性日常问题的影响。因此，该项目涉及日常生活中社会关系背景下的认知。具体来说，本研究的目的是：(a)比较与伴侣互动或独自解决工具和人际日常问题的年轻人和老年人的表现，以及(b)确定在协作互动中发生的人际关系、认知和动机过程如何促进或阻碍成年早期和后期解决问题的表现。该研究的中心假设是，年轻人和老年人解决问题的表现（以他们解决不明确的工具和人际问题的策略的质量和数量为指标）将随着与伴侣合作与单独工作、问题的工具或人际领域、伴侣的认知能力和共同工作的动机以及面对面社会互动的感知质量而系统性地变化。这一中心假设经过了系统和全面的测试，以便提供具体的知识，了解年轻人和老年人在与他人合作解决日常问题时可能产生的收益和损失。没有这方面的知识，社会关系和认知表现之间的联系在以后的生活中将仍然不发达。通过提供这些知识，本研究将促进经验支持的干预措施的发展，以提高个人解决日常问题的技能，并为研究文献做出重要的理论和经验贡献。

The proposed project seeks to understand healthy aging processes through an investigation of cognition in context. In accord with the mission statement of the Behavioral and Social Research (BSR) program of the NIA, the long-term objective of the proposed research is to identify how social contexts shape cognitive development. Of specific interest is how individuals draw from their own abilities and interpersonal relationships to solve problems of daily life and age successfully. The objective of this project, which is one step toward understanding how social contexts shape cognition, is to compare the consequences of working alone versus collaborating with a familiar social partner for younger and older adults' solutions to interpersonal and instrumental everyday problems. Thus, the project addresses cognition in the context of social relationships in daily life. Specifically, the aims of the proposed research are to: (a) compare the performance of younger and older adults who interact with a partner or work alone to solve instrumental and interpersonal everyday problems, and (b) determine how interpersonal, cognitive, and motivational processes that occur during collaborative interactions facilitate or hinder problem-solving performance in early and later adulthood. The central hypothesis of the research is that younger and older adults' problem-solving performance (as indexed by the quality and quantity of their strategies for solving ill-defined instrumental and interpersonal problems) will vary systematically as a function of working with a partner versus working alone, the instrumental or interpersonal domain of the problem, partners' cognitive abilities and motivation for working together, and the perceived quality of face-to-face social interaction. This central hypothesis is tested systematically and comprehensively in order to provide concrete knowledge of the gains and losses that may accrue when younger and older adults collaborate with others to solve everyday problems. Without this knowledge, associations between social relationships and cognitive performance in later life will remain underdeveloped. By providing this knowledge, the proposed research will facilitate the development of empirically-supported interventions to improve individuals' skills for solving everyday problems and make significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the research literature.