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The population of adults over age 65 in the United States is expected to reach 89 million by 2050. This population growth will increase demand for aging services at the local and federal levels. Older adults are remaining in their homes in increasing numbers and are part of a paradigm shift that is transferring healthcare services from a centralized institutional model to a decentralized home-based model. However, a majority of homes older adults reside in lack basic accessibility features and are in predominantly suburban locations that have limited transportation options. Villages, a multi-faceted aging support program, were established to address limitations encountered by older adults as they age in their homes and communities. These volunteer-based, membership organizations are becoming a popular and rapidly adopted community-based intervention, but research on Villages has been limited. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine how two groups of older adults living in a suburban Naturally Occurring Retirement Community (NORC) aged in community. One group belonged to a Village and the other did not. The theory of residential normalcy provided the theoretical framework for examining how the older adults adapted to their environments through service use and support. Data analysis from interviews revealed four themes: access to information among the Village members and nonmembers; the role of social networks; useful services when aging in community; and the importance of trusted guidance as provided by the Village director. Because Village members have access to additional and consistent support sources, may be better able maintain residential normalcy and therefore age in community longer and more safely than non-members. / Ph. D.

<p>In the face of declines in memory related to specific events, people maintain intact general knowledge into very old age. Older adults often use this knowledge to support their remembering. Semantic illusions involve situations in which presented information contradicts correct knowledge; the illusion occurs when people fail to notice a contradiction with what they know. Compared to younger adults, older adults' later memories are surprisingly less affected by semantic illusions. That is, they use fewer errors seen in the semantic illusions as answers when later asked related general knowledge questions. Why do older adults show this reduced suggestibility, and what role does their intact knowledge play? In 5 experiments, I explored these questions. Older adults' reduced suggestibility was not due to an age difference in error detection: older adults were no better than younger adults at detecting the errors that contradicted their stored knowledge. In addition, episodic memory failures were not a major factor either; the evidence for their direct involvement was mixed. Instead, prior knowledge seems to have been particularly protective for older adults. They demonstrated more knowledge to begin with but also gained access to even more of their stored knowledge across the duration of experiments, leading them to be less suggestible following semantic illusions. There was also an indication that when knowledge was stably accessible, older adults had a tendency to rely on it more than did younger adults. Broadly, these findings indicate that older adults' intact prior knowledge provides important benefits to their remembering and can even protect them against acquiring erroneous information about the world.</p> / Dissertation

As gerontology has shifted from emphasizing the problems of aging to exploring how older adults can thrive, researchers have increased their attention on new issues including sexuality and aging. A sometimes explicit, but often implicit assumption in this research, is that sex is good for you—that it is an integral part of a full and healthy life or successful aging. Although successful aging is one of the most commonly cited theories in social gerontology (Alley et al. 2010), it has not gone without criticism (Martinson and Berridge 2014). Using an unrefined successful aging framework for sex research has the potential to promote aging and sexuality in narrow ways and privilege certain groups over others. This research examines the relationship between sexual activity and health from a feminist gerontological perspective. In particular, I explore differences in what counts as sex and how gender and social location influence the relationship between health and sexual activity. Using a nationally representative sample of community dwelling older adults (3005) from the first wave of the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, I find that older adults engage in a wide variety of sexual activity which differs by social location (e.g. gender, race, and class). Furthermore, gender differences in sexual behavior are not merely due to a lack of access to healthy partners for women. Much of the gender gap in sexual behavior can be explained by disparities in sexual interest and desire. In addition, using more inclusive definitions of sex, partnered sexual behavior is associated with health even after accounting for demographics and relationship factors. In conclusion, existing models of aging and sexuality, relying on successful aging or a correlation between continued sexual activity and health, may limit our understanding of the experiences of women and sexual minorities. A feminist gerontological approach provides a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between health and continued sexual activity.

<p>Self-compassion has been shown to predict well-being, possibly by buffering people against the unpleasant emotional and cognitive reactions that accompany negative life events. Although most previous research has been conducted with young adults, preliminary studies show that self-compassion may be beneficial for older adults. Three studies tested self-compassion's impact on thoughts, emotions, and behaviors associated with aging using samples of individuals between the ages of 62 and 104. Study 1 examined self-compassion as it relates to health promotion behaviors, specifically use of assistance and trying new activities. Although some findings supported the hypotheses, results showed that high and low self-compassionate individuals did not differ in their use of assistance or willingness to try new activities. Study 2 implemented a brief self-compassion manipulation to test its effects on thoughts and emotions. Unfortunately, random assignment failed to equate the experimental conditions, rendering the results difficult to interpret. After controlling for baseline self-compassion, the manipulation did not have the predicted effects on well-being. In fact, participants seemed to benefit more when merely writing about negative events than when writing about them in a self-compassionate fashion. Finally, Study 3 examined self-compassionate cognitions, specifically whether or not self-compassionate thoughts mediate the relationship between trait self-compassion and emotional well-being. Self-compassionate participants did think differently than their low self-compassion counterparts, and these cognitions mediated the relationship between self-compassion and positivity of their responses. However, cognitions did not mediate the relationship between trait self-compassion and emotion outcomes. Two possible explanations for the unexpected results of the three studies include the relatively healthy nature of the sample and the strength of the self-compassion manipulation. Suggestions for future research include examining how self-compassion relates to the motivations behind engaging in health promotion, allowing participants to write more freely in the self-compassion manipulations, and bringing self-compassion research with older adults into controlled laboratory settings.</p> / Dissertation

The provocation for this dissertation is a brief contention: aging is not synonymous with disease. This contention is a corrective reaction to the pervasive sensibility that aging is a disease, and which therefore casts the character of time’s passing as a process of destruction. The upshot of this corrosive sensibility is that we are not aging well. Guided both by the belief that we can reconstruct the meaning of time’s passing and an ameliorative sensibility to heal human suffering, the dissertation offers an alternative, more fruitful understanding of aging in which the character of time changes from a process of destruction into one of creative individual genesis. This is how we should experience time as time passes. Living in this way is an achievement: It is the activity of ferreting out the best possible ways in which to live so that life is deep and robust with concatenated meaning. This philosophical diagnosis of aging is situated within two philosophical traditions—first, existentialism and, second and primarily, the pragmatism of classical American philosophers. The deceptively simple insights from existentialism at work in the dissertation are this: that we are ontologically free to choose our own persons and that our freedom resides in the ever-present possible. The next philosophical move that is made is the pragmatic turn: that, with a sense that there is always something better, we attend to how it is that we press into our possibilities by listening to and heeding experience so that we adapt and grow as individuals.

This thesis concerns the asymmetric mechanism by which the "molecular aging clock" is reset in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is of great interest considering that many organisms' cells--including human stem cells--undergo this process. When yeast divides, it ages a generation, while daughter cells begin life at generation zero. One theory surrounding this process in yeast is the extrachromosomal rDNA circle (ERC) aging theory. ERCs are generated spontaneously in mother cells as they age, and thus accumulate exponentially in older cells. Daughter cells from young mothers benefit from asymmetric aging, but as mothers age, they produce daughters that prematurely senesce. Studies suggested that ERCs may be a cytoplasmic senescence factor that is passed from mother to daughter as the mother ages, possibly due to the mother's inability to maintain cellular pathways responsible for asymmetric processes as she ages. ASH1 is a gene that encodes an asymmetrically-distributed protein that halts expression of HO endonuclease--an enzyme critical to mating-type switch--in daughter cells. Previous studies in our lab showed that deleting ASH1 led to a decrease in daughter lifespan compared to wild-type strains. In this thesis, I present evidence of a possible connection between ASH1 and cell cycle regulation. Furthermore, the detection of ERC accumulation via Southern blotting in the mutant ASH1 strain, but not the wild-type strain, provides support that ERCs may be a senescence factor in yeast. Lastly, preliminary microarray analysis reveals several genes related to cell cycle regulation being affected by the deletion of ASH1.

This study used combined methods of observations, interviews and document analysis to understand issues related to aging in Indonesia. The study describes relevant policy and practices for older persons in Indonesia, and discusses major social issues of poverty, the need for social security, and ambivalent views of older people in Indonesian society. While the Social Department Affair (Depsos) has pioneered in providing initiatives for older persons, the benefits of these supports are often limited (e.g., formal sector, urban areas). Complexities of the emphasis on family caregiving, constrained government budgets, and social stigma (e.g., "the last priority") mean that older people do not necessarily receive appropriate support from government and society. The role of religion, culture and gender in shaping aging issues are specifically discussed. It would seem that improving the lives of older people in Indonesia requires a social work approach drawing on outside examples while maintaining local tradition.

Thesis (MGeront)--University of South Australia, 1999

Project (D. Min.)--Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, 1976. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves vii-x).