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performance can serve to motivate individuals to learn new skills, develop com-
pensatory strategies, seek help from others, or become dysfunctionally anxious
about such failures and subsequently avoid tasks at which they sense they are no
longer as proficient as they once were. Thus, decrements (real and perceived) in
everyday skill can be both a cause of and a consequence of emotional concern,
the anticipation of decline, or changes in perceived social support linked to such
declines. Such a perspective on the enhancement of functioning also reflects an
emphasis on the study of the aging mind in context by studying older persons’
motives to maintain their skills.
Data collected by the first author (Hayslip, Servaty, & Ward, 1996; Hayslip,
Servaty, Ward, & Blackburn, 1995) support the contention that the use of everyday
skills is indeed related to perceptions of one’s competence to carry out such tasks.
Nearly 400 community-residing elderly rated 100 task examples along the dimen-
sions of worry, intellectual vitality, everyday relevance, and competence. Such rat-
ings are stable over time (Hayslip & Thomas, 1999). Not only were such ratings
differentially related to level of education, health, and gender, but they also were
differentially yet predictably related to measures of intellectual self-efficacy,
needs for cognitive stimulation or activity, self-rated everyday cognitive difficul-
ties, locus of control, and anxiety (Hayslip et al., 1995). This suggests that older
persons worried more (p < .05) about their ability to perform everyday tasks, which
tapped IADLs such as cooking, shopping, cleaning, money management, driving,
accessing public transportation, dealing with health and legal matters, using the
telephone, and remembering names, faces, figures of an everyday character. More-
over, they also ascribed more everyday importance (functionality) to such tasks,
deemed them to be more critical to their intellectual health and vitality, and, sur-
prisingly, felt more competent in their ability to complete such tasks well. All of
these judgments were contrasted with nonecological measures of short-term mem-
ory, crystallized ability (Gc), and fluid ability (Gf). Moreover, additional data
examining personality-ability relationships (Hayslip, 1988) and relationships be-
tween psychoneuroimmunological indicators of stress (cortisol, Epstein Barr
virus) and intellectual performance or intellectual self-efficacy (Kelly & Hayslip,
2000; Kelly et al., 1998; Kelly, Hayslip, & Servaty, 1997; Kelly, Hayslip, Servaty, &
Ennis, 1997) reinforce the conclusion that older adults do experience stress or anx-
iety when confronted with tasks that are either unfamiliar or difficult. These data
also suggest that older persons are concerned about losing those skills that are in-
tact at present. These studies involved community-residing samples of older per-
sons who were in varying degrees worried about the loss of their skills.
The studies by Hayslip et al. (1995, 1996) in particular suggest that, relative to
nonecological tasks, older persons not only estimate their everyday skills to be
greater than they are, place more value on being able to perform such tasks well,
and associate feelings of intellectual vitality with being able to perform such
tasks. Individuals also worry more about being able to perform such tasks. Con-
sequently, they are more concerned about skills that they place a greater value on
in both an intellectual and an everyday sense, despite the fact they rate their abil-
ity to perform such tasks positively. This could easily also reflect an awareness of
the fact that although their skills are still intact, older persons nevertheless worry
about no longer being as skilled in the future.
More direct evidence regarding the relationship between anxiety and everyday
skill has been gathered by the first author (Hayslip, Elias, Barta, & Henderson,