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ABSTRACT
In this study, older adults’ future time perspective was examined as a moderator of the associations between their age-related communication and aging efficacy. Hierarchical multiple regressions revealed that aging efficacy was consistently high when older adults viewed their future as expansive, regardless of their tendency to communicate as a gloomy ager or an engaged ager. Conversely, the tendency to communicate as a gloomy ager was negatively associated with aging efficacy for older adults who viewed their future as restricted. The tendency to communicate as an engaged ager was positively associated with aging efficacy for older adults who viewed their future as restricted. Age-related communication may increase in potency when people perceive their life as nearing an end.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on an earlier version of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Paper history
This paper won a Top Four Paper Award from the Communication and Aging Division of the 2021 conference of the National Communication Association in Seattle, WA.
Notes
1. One participant did not answer any of the 21 own age-related communication items and thus could not be classified into one of the four profiles.
2. Cronbach’s alpha for the full ten-item future time perspective measure (α = .937) was nearly identical to Cronbach’s alpha for the shortened seven-item future time perspective measure (α = .933). Given this, the substantive analyses were rerun with the full ten-item measure. Both significant two-way interactions reported in the results section involving the seven-item measure were also significant when this measure was replaced with the full ten-item measure. Thus, removing the three items with relatively weak factor loadings and conceptual issues did not affect the substantive results.
3. The two previous CEMSA studies on dispositional hope (Bernhold, Citation2022; Bernhold & Giles, Citation2019b) used seven of the eight items in the dispositional hope scale to operationalize dispositional hope given that one item (i.e., “I’ve been pretty successful in life”) might have overlapped with successful aging, which was another construct of main interest in these two studies. Given that successful aging was not a construct of main interest in the present study, the full eight-item scale was used to operationalize dispositional hope in the present study.