The Association between Executive Functioning Skills and Spousal Attributions: An Investigation of Younger and Older Samples

Abstract

Marriage in older age has been shown to provide important benefits such as increased emotional support, increased affective positivity and decreased health concerns (Stinnett et al., 1972; Erikson et al., 1986; Parron, 1982). While relationship satisfaction has been shown to increase in later years (Carstensen et al., 1996), there is variability in relationship satisfaction levels in the marriages of older individuals (Carstensen et al., 1995). In the current study, I focused on how individuals construe the meaning of their partner’s negative behaviour and investigated how such attributions, a key relationship process, change as a function of age. An attribution is the process by which individuals explain the causes of a behaviour or event. Individuals make attributions in order to create a more stable, predictable world (Heider, 1958; Kelley, 1972; Miller et al., 1978). To address my goal, I included a sample of younger individuals (ages 18-35 years, N=63) and a sample of older individuals (60 years and older, N=69). The second goal of the current study was to examine how declines in executive functioning skills, that occur as part of normative aging, influence the types of attributions that individuals make about their partner’s behaviours. I compared predictions offered by two important and influential theories of aging, Socioemotional Selectivity theory and the Frontal Aging hypothesis. Socioemotional Selectivity theory posits that as mortality becomes more salient, one’s motivation shifts to maximizing emotional well-being (Carstensen, 2006; Carstensen et al., 1999; Mather & Knight, 2006). As a result, older adults are able to employ cognitive strategies to improve emotion regulation because they are more focused on emotional goals. Paradoxically, the Frontal Aging hypothesis has established that executive functioning systems decline with age (Dempster, 1992). Research on executive functioning suggests declines should also be associated with less flexibility and more negative attributions (Gross & John, 1998). To test these theories, I ran multiple regression analyses to test the main effects of relationship satisfaction, executive functioning skills, and age on each of the attribution variables. In addition to the main effects models, I conducted a multiple moderation analyses for each outcome variable. Specifically, I included the two-way interaction between executive functioning and age, as well as the two-way interaction between executive functioning and relationship satisfaction. Overall, the study findings provided greater support for Socioemotional Selectivity theory, as older adults tended to provide less negative attributions for their partner’s undesirable behaviours. Further, the study findings showed that older individuals with weaker executive functioning skills tend to make more positive attributions for their partner’s behaviour when they have high levels of relationship satisfaction. Therefore, while I found that executive functioning does decline with age, in line with the Frontal Aging hypothesis, the consequences of those declines on relationship attributions are protected by other mechanisms that come ‘online’ when older individuals are satisfied within their relationships.