The paper describes a social-contextual model of the process whereby individuals in connection with others anticipate and cope with everyday life problems. From this model, appraisal and stress are conceptualised at a variety of levels, ranging from solely individual appraisal of everyday problems to integrated and shared relational appraisal by a social unit. Coping efforts likewise range from solely individual efforts to highly collaborative efforts. Our developmental work on everyday problem solving is used to illustrate how coping efforts are embedded in a rich social context, are appraised within that context, and frequently involve the use of others in ways that extend beyond using individuals for support. Our work suggests a reorientation of stress and coping research away from documenting general developmental differences in coping strategies to understanding the process whereby individuals and others in their social context anticipate and cope with everyday life problems. We suggest that this process is a dynamic one in which microdevelopmental change across a current coping situation and macrodevelopmental change across the lifespan are examined.

The present paper reviews the extant literature on collaborative everyday problem solving in older adulthood and explicates the contexts, functions, forms, and processes of collaboration in daily life. In this review, we examine collaboration as it occurs in the daily lives of older adults in addition to the specified intelligence-like tasks more typical of the current literature. Drawing from multiple literatures that have examined collaboration, including sociocultural perspectives within child development, life-span cognition, educational psychology, and social psychology, we illuminate the changing contexts of collaboration across the life span and examine the role of potential collaborators, the multiplicity of forms and functions of collaboration, and the social processes that may facilitate or hinder collaborative performance.

The study explores the importance of conversational processes for understanding collaborative cognitive performance by examining the interactions of married couples that facilitate performance on 2 everyday cognitive tasks. Twenty-four adults, 6 young (M age = 29.7 years) and 6 older (M = 70.8 years) married couples, completed a vacation decision-making task and an errand-running task. Couples were asked to talk as they performed the tasks and speech acts were coded as to whether they involved high-affiliation exchanges (between-partner sequences of cooperative and obliging speech acts) or low-affiliation exchanges (between-partner sequences of controlling and withdrawing speech acts). Interactions characterized by high affiliation were associated with greater use of information and the use of feature based DISCOURSE PROCESSES, 35(1), search strategies on the decision-making task and shorter routes on the errand-running task. Open-ended interviews revealed the importance of division of labor and delegation when collaborating in daily life. The results illustrate the diversity present in couples' interactive patterns and approaches to collaboration. Further, the results demonstrate the potential of integrating work on collaborative cognition and conversational processes.Researchers investigating cognition in everyday contexts have examined how individuals make decisions (e.g.. Given the focus of this literature on the cognitive outcomes of collaboration, little research has examined the social interactions that may facilitate collaborative performance. This study examines how married couples solve everyday problems together and the interactions that facilitate everyday problem-solving performance. Gould et al., 1991) found that married couples benefit from working together to perform memory tasks. Their work also suggests features of interactions that are important for facilitating performance. Dixon (1992) found that young and old adults who worked with one or two other people outperformed individuals who completed free recall and fact memory tasks alone. Young and old adults benefited from group discussions regarding strategies that would maximize performance, negotiations regarding how the strategies would be implemented and the correct answer to the problems. Through an examination of the conversations involved in remembering, Gould et al. (1994) found that older married couples were more likely than younger married couples to time their discussion concerning strategies for remembering at a point when individual-based recall was declining. Thus, it appears that married couples benefit when collaboration occurs through interactions that involve shared effort, negotiations, and elaborations that support and extend individual cognitive functioning. An extensive literature in child development provides further support for the idea that qualities of individuals' interactions are important for understanding cognitive performance in collaborative settings (see Rogoff, 1998, for a review). A potentially interactive co...

The role of experience in understanding age differences in strategy generation and information requests for solving everyday problems was explored in young and older adults. Participants received three hypothetical problems dealing with going to doctor’s offices and going to dinner parties and were probed extensively for their strategies and information they would like to solve the problems. Experience with these two domains was assessed by participants’ reports of their experience, script knowledge, and the presence of experience in problem definitions. No age differences were found in these experience measures. Age differences were found in the number of strategies generated and the amount of information requested to solve the problem. Two patterns of everyday problem solving were uncovered: an exhaustive style (involving inferential problem definition, elaborate strategy generation, and information requests); and an experiential style (involving experiential problem definition, less strategy generation, and fewer information requests). The results are interpreted within a model that uses individuals’ problem definitions to understand multiple aspects of everyday problem-solving performance.

Investigations of peer collaboration often vary task or social aspects of collaborative contexts and assume that these aspects of the context are experienced similarly by individuals. The present study examined how social aspects (group friendship and gender) of a peer collaborative context related to differences in adolescents' interpretations of task and social problems that occurred while collaborating with peers in a naturalistic classroom setting. Eighth-grade adolescents (N = 82, 44 females) worked with peers on a six-week Spanish project at school. Adolescents chose to work primarily with same-gender peers and friends. Task and social interpretations of problems were assessed twice. The salience of task problems decreased over time; social problems became somewhat more salient. Social problems were less salient to females than to males. Greater group friendship was associated with the lesser salience of task problems early in the project. The salience of social problems, gender, and friendship were important for understanding performance on the project. The value of considering the context of peer collaborative problem solving from individuals' perspectives is discussed.