Cognitive monitoring and strategy choice in younger and older adults

Younger (24- to 39-year-old) and older (60- to 88-year-old) adults learned a list of vocabulary words; one half of the words were studied using a generally more powerful strategy (mnemonic keyword method), and one half mediated with a less powerful approach (generating semantic contexts). Before using these strategies as part of the experiment, neither younger nor older adults judged that the keyword method was more effective and neither group preferred one strategy over the other. After using the strategies and taking a test of strategically studied unfamiliar vocabulary words, the younger subjects reported accurately the relative effectiveness of the two strategies and selected the one that had worked better for them to apply to a subsequent list of vocabulary items. The older participants were not as aware of the differential potency of the strategies and did not rely as much as did the younger subjects on knowledge of strategy utility in making strategy choices. In short, metacognitive awareness of strategy effects produced by monitoring and use of metacognitive awareness in regulating strategy choice were more pronounced in the younger compared with the older sample in this study.     

Forgetting of pictures over a long retention interval in young and older adults

Young and older adults were presented with pictures for study. Their recognition of the information was tested at five retention intervals: immediately, and 48 hr, 1 week, 2 weeks, and 4 weeks later. The main finding of interest was that picture recognition did not show an age-related decline until the 1-week retention interval.     

Different patterns of cognitive slowing produced by Alzheimer's disease and normal aging

Aging has previously been shown to produce a generalized proportional slowing of all cognitive operations. In contrast, the present results suggested that Alzheimer's disease produces a disproportionate reduction in the speed with which patients carry out one or more mental operations. The tasks that demented patients found particularly difficult involved either a self-directed search of their lexicon or the use of familiarity information.     

Adult age differences in the effects of sentence context and stimulus degradation during visual word recognition

I investigated adult age differences in the efficiency of feature-extraction processes during visual word recognition. Participants were 24 young adults (M age = 21.0 years) and 24 older adults (M age = 66.5 years). On each trial, subjects made a word/nonword discrimination (i.e., lexical decision) regarding a target letter-string that was presented as the final item of a sentence context. The target was presented either intact or degraded visually (by the presence of asterisks between adjacent letters). Age differences in lexical decisions speed were greater for degraded targets than for intact targets, suggesting an age-related slowing in the extraction of feature-level information. For degraded word targets, however, the amount of performance benefit provided by the sentence context was greater for older adults than for young adults. It thus appears that an age-related deficiency at an early stage of word recognition is accompanied by an increased contribution from semantic context.     

Remarriage as a coping response for widowhood

Consideration and use of remarriage as a response to cope with the death of a husband was examined in 39 women who had been widowed and had subsequently remarried, 192 widows who had considered remarriage but had not yet remarried, and 420 widows who had not considered remarriage. Controlling for age, we found that women who had remarried reported fewer current concerns than did the other two groups. Furthermore, we found that women who retrospectively recalled the most concerns immediately after the death of the spouse were the ones who eventually remarried. The remarried group believed that they were experiencing significantly fewer concerns now than they had after the spouse's death; the women who had not considered remarriage believed that they were experiencing the same number of concerns now as before; and those women who had considered remarriage believed that they were experiencing significantly more concerns. Implications for remarriage as a coping mechanism for widowhood and the relation of age to remarriage decisions are discussed.     

Personal Versus Vocational Focus in Career Counseling: A Retrospective Outcome Study

In this archival study the authors sought to determine the relationship, if any, between counseling outcomes and the topical focus in career counseling. Twenty-two counselors saw 46 adult clients at a community-based clinic for an average of eight sessions. Counseling outcome and topical focus (the extent to which the actual content of counseling sessions reflected relatively more vocationally or personally focused topics) were assessed from follow-up questionnaires to former career clients and from trained raters' evaluations of the counselors' written progress notes. Results showed that, from the counselors' perspective, outcomes were better when the focus of the sessions was relatively more vocational than personal and when relatively more interviews were held. Client satisfaction, on the other hand, was predictable only from the counselor's level of experience. Satisfaction with occupational status was not associated with any of the client, counselor, or treatment factors. Discussion focuses on the contribution of the results to career counseling practice and on the feasibility and validity of retrospective, archival research.     

Menopause: Salient Issues for Counselors

Counselors are in ideal positions to help change attitudes toward viewing menopause as a time of positive change, rather than a time of psychological distress. Following definitions and a review of historical, sociological, psychological, and attitudinal factors that account for negative responses associated with menopause, recommendations for counselor interventions are proposed.     

A Gender Role Workshop Focused on Sexism,Gender Role Conflict,and the Gender Role Journey

A 6-day gender role workshop for adult men and women, using the phases of the gender role journey, is presented. The workshop's curriculum and process are described, including its assumptions, norms, and media. Movie clips, music, music videos, and academic content were used to promote participants' learning in both the cognitive and affective domains. Systematic follow-up evaluations of participants ( N =84) in three separate workshops are reported using Likert scaled questions. These evaluations assessed participants' personal learning, emotional reactions, and the workshop's overall impact over l-month and 1-and 2-year follow-up periods. Results indicate that participants were affected personally and professionally over the various time periods.     

Norm-of-reaction: definition and misinterpretation of animal research

The development of a phenotype is due to an interaction of the genotype with the environment. Two terms have been used to describe the outcome of this interaction, the norm-of-reaction and the reaction range. The first represents the theoretically limitless distribution of the phenotypes that may be expressed by a given genotype. The reaction range implies an upper and lower limit for phenotype expression possible from a given genotype. A critical distinction between the reaction range and the norm-of-reaction is that the norm-of-reaction is a statement of the conceivable interactions found but does not imply any predictability other than that within the conditions previously tested experimentally, that is, the tails of a normal distribution are infinitely variable, whereas the concept of reaction range implies a limitation inherent in the genotype, that is, a finite range. Empirical support for the reaction-range concept is questionable. Animal studies cited in support of the reaction range have been inappropriately and incorrectly interpreted.