Grandparents play a vital role in the lives of their grandchildren. A midwest sample of 100 matched pairs of grandfathers and grandmothers and 70 individual grandmothers provided information specific to each of their 770 middle generation children and 1,254 grandchildren. The results revealed no significant correlation between emotional closeness…

Memory studies involving older adults have typically been conducted in laboratory settings and have usually employed experimental tasks. Most results support cognitive decline. Most naturalistic experimental studies relate to spatial memory and test younger respondents. When older respondents are tested, the old sometimes outperform and sometimes…

Delayed and chronic symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) have been documented in Vietnam veterans for up to 10-15 years following the stressor and in veterans of World War II and Korea for as long as 40 years. Group therapy for Vietnam veterans with PTSD has been found to be an effective treatment, but prior research has not tested…

Values enter into the consideration of chronic care options at both the macro, or policy level, and at the individual, decision making level. The ethical dimensions of these decisions, however, have been largely overlooked. A model of long-term care (LTC) decision making is proposed which incorporates an empirical foundation into an ethical…

An overview is presented on current knowledge about elderly mentally retarded persons. Definitional and incidence issues are addressed, and support is voiced for use of a lower cut-off for the beginning of old age among the retarded than for the general population. Conflicting findings of age-related differences in mentally retarded adults are…

Life event measurement in the Arizona State University Life Events and Aging project includes monthly assessments of both major and small life events. Major events are measured using a 96-item Psychiatric Epidemiological Research Instrument (PERI) Major Life Events Scale which concentrates on health issues and events in the experiential domain of…

For members of the elderly housing industry, important questions concern how people decide to become residents of a particular senior community, how they function after they move in, and how they feel about their experience in the community. Scientists can design and conduct research to answer these questions. In an elderly housing facility,…

Research has shown that being a caregiver is often very stressful, particularly for individuals acting as caregivers for a demented elder. Caregivers might gain needed time to relax if there were leisure time activities available for demented individuals. A study was undertaken which involved development of the leisure activities; selection and…

Although criteria for the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD) have become better defined, few research findings have appeared in the literature which characterize the degenerative course of the disease. Of particular interest to both clinicians and researchers would be a study focusing on changes in the patient's…

Studies on retirement reporting that, compared to people not retired, recent retirees exhibited less income, more physical and mental illness, lower self-esteem, and less life satisfaction have been challenged and new findings have been revealed by longitudinal studies using data from large samples. It appears that perhaps the way individuals…

In order to test the effectiveness of the use of pets with the elderly in a nursing home setting, three concurrent studies were conducted. The 29 residents participating in the experiment were selected by nursing home personnel as meeting the criteria of being depressed and withdrawn, and receiving no regular (weekly) visitors. Study I compared…

Research shows that subjective indices of social integration are related to general well-being. In order to study the relationship between social interaction and well-being, 31 healthy Caucasian adults, with a mean age of 73 years, were given two questionnaires. The first contained eleven subjective social interation variables and was derived from…

As part of the adult education program of Mountain View-Los Altos (California) High School District, elderly patients at skilled nursing care facilities take classes in poetry. The poetry classes are therapeutic in nature, satisfying a real need for these very ill elderly people to express their frustrations, hopes, fears, and joys. All of the…

This planning guide is intended as a reference for individuals developing a self-directed health promotion/wellness program for older women. The introduction defines the concept of wellness, and the seven tasks involved in the action planning process. Six steps in designing a program are outlined, including laying the groundwork, targeting…

Bereavement and depression are two clinical problems which are prevalent in elderly persons and which may coincide in older adults. This study was conducted to examine how depression interacts with bereavement status. Data were obtained from 393 adults over the age of 55 who participated at four times of measurement (within 1 month of their…