Research-informed policy and practice is needed for older caregivers of adult sons/daughters with disabilities. These caregivers are often under tremendous stress because of failing health, financial pressures, bereavement and worry about the future of their sons/daughters. Twenty-nine older parents/caregivers of 27 adults with intellectual and/or…

Background: Mobility limitations increase with age in the general population. Despite a growing population of older adults with intellectual disabilities (ID), mobility is rarely studied in the ID literature. The specific aim of this study was to identify and summarise primary literature investigating mobility limitations in adults with ID.…

Although previous research indicates that self-concept scores of elderly people are higher than both test norms and scores for younger groups, some researchers have hypothesized that the higher self-concept scores are the result of denial and are not an indication of true self-concept. To investigate the consistency of higher test scores across…

Interviewed 53 noninstitutionalized elderly to examine patterns of exchange of assistance within their informal helping networks. Results suggest inability to reciprocate rather than need for assistance had a greater negative effect on morale. There was a negative relationship between formal service use and reliance on the informal network.…

Attempts to isolate lexical access latencies by measuring word-naming times in two conditions: (1) words were preidentified and had only to be pronounced on signal; (2) words had to be both identified and pronounced. Results strengthen the conclusion that vocal programing is exempt from the age declines seen in other sensory-motor tracts.…

Although it has been suggested that contact with children is important for the satisfaction of the economic, emotional, and service needs of older parents, social gerontology research provides little direct evidence that childless elders or elders with few living children are less satisfied than others. To examine the effects of family size,…

While it is clear that health status is important in determining morale, and that social contact also contributes to morale, the interaction of health status and social contact on morale is not well understood. Elderly frail community residents (N=40) were interviewed twice in a 1-year period about their contact with friends, grandchildren,…

Information on male linkage is usually generalized from studies of female linkage and the saliency of the father-son tie in later life is unclear. The importance of the father-son tie was examined in 56 men aged 65 and older through a comparative analysis designed to compare the levels of association and helping between fathers and sons to those…

Effects of advanced aging on hemispheric organization for linguistic processing was investigated with 24 geriatric subjects. Findings indicated that only the left hemisphere was used in language processing, suggesting that right hemispheric language processing ability is inhibited in the elderly. (Author/DB)

An error-detection paradigm was used to examine the ability of young and old adults of varying educational levels to comprehend texts. Results indicated that young and old adults were equally able to detect textual inconsistencies; however, better educated adults detected more inconsistencies than less educated adults. (Author/RH)

Replicated Tringo's research measuring respondents attitudes about various groups. Results indicated positive shift in attitudes toward older persons. Discusses findings in terms of Harasymiw's continuum of normalcy, Tibbitts' view regarding improving societal attitudes toward older people, and Schonfield's conclusion that Americans do not hold…

A 2-microphone dereverberation technique was evaluated by obtaining speech recognition measures and preference judgments from 10 normal-hearing adults and 7 older adult hearing-impaired listeners. Both groups had higher scores at the shorter reverberation time than at the longer reverberation time. Hearing-impaired subjects performed significantly…

Intraoral air pressure was recorded during the production of consonant cognate pairs by 8 esophageal speakers (mean age 67 years) under 2 experimental conditions: after the insufflation of air and without air insufflation. Results revealed that peak intraoral air pressure magnitudes were significantly greater following the insufflation of air than…

Using data collected through telephone interviews with a national sample of adults, this study searched for evidence as to whether interviewers have stronger effects on the responses given to a wide range of questions by older people than on the responses of younger people. Responses to 30 items for which significant interviewer effects had…

The marital relationship is a basic context of retirement, where spouses' separate perceptions of retirement, and of each other's views, are an essential part of the retirement experience. To explore this issue, 297 married men who had been retired for 6 years or less, all participants in the Veterans Administration Normative Aging Study, reported…