Individual Social Peers Choose Preferences

The change of elder's psychological and behavioral have attracted more and more attention because of the aging of population. Socioemotional Selectivity Theory provides a reasonable explanation for the change of elder's social partner preference: With the effect of future time perspective, young people tend to pursue the knowledge, like to make new friends and expand their social circle; older people tend to regulate their emotion and keeping happy mood, narrowing the scope of their own social circle actively, like to get along with familiar family and friends. young people will show similar social partner preference when their have limited time perspective. Controlling Theory have different point, consider that people purse the regulation of emotion not only due to the limited future time perspective, it may also because that their perceived knowledge acquisition is difficult to achieve and make the next best choice. On the basis of this conflict, this study will discuss how the limited time and blocked goals affect individual's social partner preference.In the first research, questionnaire method was applied to investigate three age individual's social partner preference and influencing factors, text the validity of experimental material for the second research. This study including 163 young participants,128 middle-aged participants and 122 older participants. The second research have two experiment, discuss the limited time and blocked goals how to affect individual's social partner preference, analyze the change of individual's social partner preference in two control situation: Experiment one use 3 (age: young/middle-aged/old) × 2 (limited time: limited time situation/normal situation) × 2 (gender: man/woman) mixed experimental design, to investigate the influence of limited time for social partner preference, have 30 young participants, middle-aged participants and older participants respectively; experiment two use 3 (age: young/middle-aged/old) × 2 ( blocked goals: blocked goals situation/normal situation)× 2 (gender: man/woman) mixed experimental design, to investigate the influence of blocked goals for social partner preference, have 30 young participants, middle-aged participants and older participants respectively (different from experiment one).Combine the two studies' analysis and discussion, this study has some conclusion:(1) The modified four social partner type was more practical in our country.(2) Age and gender will significantly influence the individual's social partner preference:As the growth of the age, individuals are tend to select the familiar social partner. Compared with man, woman are more inclined to select the familiar social partner, but the influence of this gender difference will decrease with the increase of age until it disappeared.(3) In two different limited situations, individual's social partner preference showed the similar characteristic to the older adults, tend to choose familiar partner without significant gender difference with different reasons: In time limited situations, individuals tend to pursue the emotional significance, choose familiar family; in goal blocked situation, individuals tend to pursue the emotional support, choose good friends whose often meet; This kind of situation difference is not affected by age and gender.