Finding interventions which can address the decline of cognitive function as people get older is of great importance to policy-makers, especially in post-industrial societies with rapidly ageing populations. We examine the impact of several different types of mentally stimulating activities on cognitive function in a sample of community-dwelling…

Being able to play the guitar and sing one's favorite songs is often an unrealized adolescent dream. Guitar Express is a group music making approach that aims to enable people to realize this dream and develop an identity of amateur musician regardless of age. This is achieved through the use of an alternate tuning of the guitar and a variety of…

Subjective memory complaints are one of the major concerns of the elderly and remain a challenging area in gerontology. There are previous studies that identify different factors affecting subjective memory complaints. However, an extended model that correlates life-space on subjective memory complaints remains a blank spot. The objective of this…

The authors trained 4 older adults with probable Alzheimer's disease to recall a name-face-occupation association using the spaced retrieval technique. Six training sessions were administered over a 2-week period. On each trial, participants selected a target photograph and stated the target name and occupation at increasingly longer retention…

Objective: To provide more insight into subjective attention complaints in a healthy adult and elderly population and how these affect Quality of Life (QoL). Method: A group of 1,550 healthy Dutch participants complete a postal questionnaire including items from the Maastricht Attention and Memory Checklist (MAC). The impact of attention…

In this paper, we discuss two types of discourse: the first one--the discourse of cognitive impairment of a long-term care facility (LTCF) reflected in the institution's language policy and in the language use of several caregivers of the LTCF; and the second one, the discourse of "small" stories (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008) told by Alise, a…

Older adults with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) are not immune to the other diseases of aging. Although AMD is the leading cause of low vision in older Americans, stroke is the leading cause of disability, and dementias affect another 2.5 million older Americans. Each condition alone can significantly impair a person's ability to…

The mythicizing of significant figures, evidenced in reminiscence among the elderly, can be interpreted as an adaptational response that is different from making sense out of one's life. Later in life the past becomes unique, and in the myth becoming the reality, one's life becomes justified. (Author)

There is a current trend towards maintaining dementia patients at home and postponing institutionalization as long as possible. Previous research has suggested that frequency of help and support received by the caregiver is more predictive of burden than memory or behavior problems of the patient. Burden and distress were investigated using a…