Publication trends in behavioral gerontology in the past 25 years: are the elderly still an understudied population in behavioral research?

The case is made that issues facing the elderly are problems of social importance that should be of interest to applied behavior analysts. An electronic review of eight prominent behaviorally‐oriented journals was conducted in order to examine the frequency of publications over the past 25 years that were concerned with issues related to aging. A total of 109 articles were devoted to aging across the eight journals, with about 30% of these involving participants with cognitive impairments. Results also indicate that each of these journals has published less than one article per year related to aging. The role behavior analysts can play in serving both the elderly and their caregivers is discussed. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Long ago it was meant to be: the interplay between time, construal, and fate beliefs

Fate means that an event was meant to be, that is, predetermined by prior unseen forces. Most people believe in fate, which seems at odds with similarly pervasive beliefs that alternative past actions would have brought about different circumstances (i.e., counterfactual beliefs). Two experiments revealed that construal level accounts for the relative plausibility of fate versus counterfactual explanations. Construal was manipulated in Experiment 1, such that goal pursuits framed in abstract ("why?") as opposed to concrete ("how?") terms heightened fate but not counterfactual attributions. Extending this finding, Experiment 2 showed that fate judgments were higher for temporally distant than recent past events, an effect mediated by construal perceptions. Neither counterfactual nor luck judgments varied with temporal distance. These findings help to explain how individuals explain complicated yet meaningful life events while extending the reach of Trope and Liberman's (2003) construal-level theory.     

Multidimensional comparison of anxiety direction and burnout over time

The purpose of this study was to assess if athletes who perceived their trait anxiety to be debilitative to performance also experienced higher burnout over a competitive season. Volunteers were 53 NCAA Division I and II male (n = 14) and female (n = 39) athletes, ages 18 to 23 years. Participants completed a trait version of the Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2D once and the Athlete Burnout Questionnaire three times during the season. A 2 (anxiety direction group) x 3 (time of season) multivariate analysis of variance indicated no significant interaction and no main effect for time of season. A significant main effect for anxiety direction group did emerge, with the Facilitative group reporting significantly lower Burnout scores overall on the Reduced Sense of Accomplishment scale than the Debilitative group. There were no differences found on the other two subscales, Emotional/Physical Exhaustion and Devaluation.