Acting or listening: Adult age differences in source recall of enacted and nonenacted statements

This study explored age-related differences in item and source recall of enacted and nonenacted items in a sample of healthy adults between the ages of 35 and 80 years (N=1,000). Participants were screened on a variety of demographic, psychometric, and biological variables. They were presented with sentences (e.g., Lift the book) that they either read or enacted. They were then asked to recall the object of each stimulus sentence (item recall) and to identify its format of encoding (source recall). Age-related decrements were observed both in item and source memory, although age differences in source memory were more accentuated than in item memory. Further, the results indicated an overall impairment of source memory across age when individual differences in the demographic, psychometric, and biological variables were taken into consideration.     

A follow-up study of cognitive bias in generalized anxiety disorder

Patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) without concurrent depression (n = 11) and normal controls (n = 17) were tested twice, about 2 months apart, on a modified Stroop colour-naming task, which presented anxiety-related, depression-related and neutral words in masked and unmasked exposure conditions. GAD patients received cognitive behaviour therapy in the test-retest interval, and were also retested at follow-up, about 20 months after initial testing. GAD patients showed interference in colour-naming negative words across both masked and unmasked conditions before treatment, but not post-treatment, compared with controls. Reduced interference effects of masked threat words over time correlated with reduced ratings of anxious thoughts at post-treatment, and at follow-up, in GAD patients. Thus, the preconscious bias for threat information in GAD appears to vary over time in association with changes in anxious thoughts and worries.     

Extreme Social Isolation, Use of Community-Based Senior Support Services, and Mortality Among African American Elderly Women

The effect of extreme social isolation and use of community-based senior services on longevity was examined in a national sample of African American elderly women (ages 55–96). Consistent with previous research on the social integration/mortality link, African American elderly women who were extremely socially isolated were hypothesized to have a higher 5-year mortality rate. It was also hypothesized that use of community senior services would be negatively associated with 5-year mortality. Results of logistic regression analysis controlling for age, education, income, and health status found that extremely socially isolated African American elderly women were three times more likely than the nonisolated women to die within the 5-year period from the initial survey. Use of community senior services did not have a relationship on mortality. Results are discussed in terms of directions for future research and intervention.     

Object knowledge and the emergence of language

Infants' spontaneous play with objects was examined for evidence of developments in object knowledge in relation to the emergence of words and the single-word period in language development. Subjects were 7 girls and 7 boys, from different ethnic and economic backgrounds, who were studied longitudinally from 9 months to 26 months of age. Two types of displacements of objects in relation to one another were identified in the children's play: separations and constructions. The development of constructions was associated with the emergence of words, and constructions increased with age while separations decreased. The development of specific constructions, which account for knowledge of the particular properties of objects, was more strongly associated with a vocabulary spurt at the end of the single-word period than with chronological age. Despite the wide variation in the infants' ages when developments in language and play were reached, relations between achievements in the two domains were consistent among them, as confirmed with the Friedman test, p<.001. The results are discussed in terms of the cognitive developments required for play with objects and saying words.     

Der Kern der materialistischen Dialektik

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Das handelnde Subjekt im Historischen Materialismus

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