No description available.

The present study was an exploration of the relationships among life satisfaction, attitudes toward aging and responses to cartoons about aging. Subjects were 86 community resident, active and financially secure adults aged 53 to 85. In this sample of subjects, the Life Satisfaction Index (Neugarten, Havighurst and Tobin, 1961) factors of Mood, Congruence and Zest combined with satisfaction with social involvements to account for 50% of the variance of attitude toward old age. Attitudes toward aging were measured with the Kogan-Wallach (1961) semantic differential evaluating the concept of "old age". As expected, all subjects rated cartoons which portrayed a clearly negative view of aging as less funny and more negative than cartoons which portrayed a more ambivalent view of aging. Contrary to expectation, responses to cartoons about aging were unrelated to life satisfaction, evaluations of old age or perceived societal attitudes toward old age.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This study investigated the effects of an intervention designed to reduce the wandering of an 80 year old female resident of a long term care facility. A behavioral analysis of natural contingencies which maintained behaviors incompatible with wandering was conducted and the data from this analysis used to develop an intervention. The intervention simulated a dining room table and coffee break which naturally maintained sitting. An ABAC design revealed that this intervention was functionally related to a reduction in the proportion of a twenty minute interval spent wandering. The discussion focuses on possible causes of wandering and future directions for establishing a behavioral technology to control wandering.

This study examines the role of emotional awareness in the retirement transition. Retirement is viewed as one of the transitions in later life and has psychological consequences. It is an objective development and social-psychological transformation that is related to physical and psychological well-being. Research has shown that emotional awareness can have an impact on the retirement transition. A correlational research survey design was used for this study to determine and establish the role of emotional awareness, preparation and emotional responses in the retirement transition. Using a five-point Likert Scale, respondents were asked to score their responses to twenty-eight items. The questionnaire was distributed to retirees on the data bases of two financial companies that manage retirement funds. The SurveyMonkey application was used to distribute the survey to one financial company’s data base, and email was used for the other. Statistics such as means, relationships between factors, Cronbach’s Alpha, Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation and descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data. The findings of this study demonstrate inconclusive evidence of emotional awareness in retirement. In addition to this, there were no significant findings regarding preparation for retirement or emotional response to retirement which indicates a neutral attitude to preparation and retirement, on average. There is a need for further future studies that include a more balanced sample representation of men and women, a comparative study based on different cultures to determine if differences exist in the experience of emotions in the retirement transition, and a field study in retirement homes and villages to corroborate the findings of this study.

Completing activities of daily life relies on using both cognitive and physical resources efficiently, but these are affected by age. This may be due either to an age-related reduction in the resources we have available for carrying out tasks or to a reduction in our ability to use these resources efficiently. These resources comprise a set of processes called executive functions (EF), which collectively allow us to plan, initiate and monitor our performance of activities. Control and allocation of these resources is attributed to a central mechanism, sometimes called the central executive or executive attention, but the parameters that determine how resources are allocated are not well understood. Even simple or apparently automatic activities, such as walking, require attention, meaning that when task demands increase, for example when walking and speaking on the phone, there is a loss of efficiency in both tasks. The dual-task (DT) paradigm is an empirical means of examining the way attentional resources are allocated between two tasks by comparing their performance together in relation to how well they are carried out singly. Asking people to perform a cognitive task, such as counting backwards or spelling, while walking provides a reasonably naturalistic way to examine how flexibly older adults can divide their attention between the two tasks. Manipulating the demands of the task, either by increasing the difficulty of the cognitive task or instructing the participants to focus on one task or the other (prioritisation) should illuminate the strategies they use to allocate their available attention between the two tasks ask task demands vary. To explore this hypothesis a cohort of physically and cognitively healthy community-dwelling older adults (mean age = 72.3 years) took part in three studies. In the first experiment, 72 participants completed 8 single and dual-task conditions with varying cognitive load (counting back in 3s and 7s) and attention prioritisation (no prioritisation, prioritising walking and prioritising counting). Instructing the participants to prioritise walking in the DT when counting back in 7s produced the best walking and counting performance and this was predicted their score on a standardised measure of cognitive flexibility. In second part of the study, 68 of the participants were tested 12 months later when there was improvement in both their single and dual-task performances. There was also decline in concurrent walking and counting performance, but only when attention was allocated to walking in preference to the cognitive task. Both the improvements and the decline in performance after the 12-month period were predicted by a standardised test for EF at T1. In the third study a separate group of older adults (73.2 years) was trained to walk rhythmically to music, to further investigate the external manipulation of resource-allocation during concurrent walking and counting. Their performances were compared to 2 control groups who did not receive the same intervention procedures. Overall findings from this doctoral research demonstrate that explicitly manipulating attention-allocation during concurrent walking and cognitive activity improved healthy older adults' walking and counting performance and this was strongly associated with better cognitive flexibility. After 12 months, subtle decline in ability to allocate attention to walking during the DT, when attentional-demands were high, was also predicted by cognitive flexibility in an EF task. Together, these findings illuminated the role of executive attention in a rapidly-changing complex task when the ‘wrong' prioritisation could result in a fall. Observing healthy older adults' cognitive flexibility in allocating attention to walking, when required, revealed that executive attention was key to the future maintenance of their current functional well-being.

No description available.

No description available.