INFLUENCE OF HIV STATUS AND AGE ON COGNITIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF OTHERS

In 2 studies the postulate that the perception of time left in life in fluences the ways that people conceptualize social relationships was e xplored. It was hypothesized that when time is limited, emotional aspe cts of relationships are highly salient. In Study 1, a card-sort parad igm involving similarity judgments demonstrated, for a sample of perso ns 18 to 88 years old, that the prominence of affect in the mental rep resentations of prospective social partners is positively associated w ith age. In Study 2, the same experimental approach was applied to a s ample of young gay men similar to one another in age, but notably diff erent in their health status (that is, HIV negative; HIV positive, asy mptomatic; and HIV positive, symptomatic). It was found that, with age held constant, increasing closeness to the end of life is also associ ated with an increasing prominence of affect in the mental representat ions of social partners. The results suggest that the perception of Li mited time, rather than chronological age, is the critical variable in fluencing mental representations of social partners.