Aging has been known to be extensively related to
changes in a variety of domains. Understanding how people differently process
information and behave in a social context with age is an important issue that aging
society is now facing. Not only our society but also researchers in academia have a
pervasive belief about late adulthood. That is, older adults display overall declines and
slowness in various physical and psychological abilities, including social cognitive
domains. To address whether such an aging-related belief is genuinely observed, the
current talk will introduce several studies on social cognition and behaviors in late
adulthood. For example, contrary to previous literature showing the age-related
declines of Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities - the ability to understand another person's
mental states, including perspectives, wishes, desires, feelings, beliefs and so on-,
some recent findings illustrated that compared to younger adults, older adults did not
always show their decline of ToM (depending on context) and that they reported
greater prosocial behaviors. Contrary to our socially stereotypical belief of aging,
these findings suggest that social cognition and behaviors may not decline, but
change, with age, thereby motivating the importance of scrutinizing how social
cognitive abilities and behaviors differ with age and what factors are associated with
such age-related changes to better understand aging.