Spirituality Among Older African Americans

Recent changes in gerontology have drawn attention to the role of spirituality among older adults. Demographic trends suggest that the number of African Americans over the age of 65 is increasing, with the largest shift to occur in persons 85 years of age and older. Given the paucity of information available regarding the relationship between spirituality and aging along with the increase in the number of older African Americans, a literature review of these concepts is sorely needed. This paper provides a thorough profile of older African Americans, with a review of historical and cultural factors that have informed the spiritual development of this population. Additionally, attention is given to methodological issues such as definitions, measures, sampling, and research designs at the interface of development and spirituality in this population. The paper also reviews findings to date about the effects of spirituality on physical and mental health among older African Americans.     

Eroticism for the masses: Japanese manga comiss and their assimilation into the U.S.

In this article, we describe translated Japanese comics or “manga” with sexual content. Because in the West comics have been treated as junk culture, they lack canons for critical analysis. We have developed methods for analyzing manga that focus on objective assessment of content, on reader subjectivity, and on how the emotional tenor of the artwork is created. We briefly review some history of Japanese art and culture, in which sexuality has always been a legitimate subject for art and which forms the cultural underpinnings of manga. We summarize the erotic themes and visions of manga with sexual content, including heterosexual courtship and consummation, female and male homosexuality, sadomasochism, transvestitism, incest, and bestiality. Critics of manga argue that it glorifies rape, a view we could not confirm. We identified 87 stories with rape or sexual assault; 80 (92.0%) show the woman or others taking violent, often murderous, revenge on sexual attackers. We also analyze visual modalities for depicting men and women. In common with older Japanese aesthetic traditions, the manga we have seen depict women as beautiful, powerful, and erotic. Finally, we suggest that manga functions as an art form by mobilizing the reader’s involvement with the characters, especially female characters, in a complex narrative framework in which sexuality is a positive virtue for men and, especially, for women. We conclude that manage contains some of the finest erotic art being produced in the world today for sheer power, elegance, and drama. Some of this material was presented at the Western Regional Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, San Diego, CA, April 6–9, 2000.     

Risk and resiliency processes in ethnically diverse families in poverty.

Families living in poverty face numerous stressors that threaten the health and well-being of family members. This study examined the relationships among family-level poverty-related stress (PRS), individual-level coping with PRS, and a wide range of psychological symptoms in an ethnically diverse sample of 98 families (300 family members) living at or below 150% of the federal poverty line. Hierarchical linear model (HLM) analyses revealed that family PRS is robustly related to a wide range of psychological syndromes for family members of both genders, all ages, and all ethnic backgrounds. In addition, primary and secondary control coping were both found to serve as buffers of PRS for many syndromes. For several psychological syndromes, parents showed significantly higher levels of symptoms, but the link between PRS and symptoms was significantly stronger for children than for adults. Ethnicity was not a significant predictor in overall HLM models or follow-up analyses, suggesting that the broad construct of PRS and the theoretical model tested here apply across the 3 major ethnic groups included in this study. The findings suggest that family-based, coping-focused interventions have the potential to promote resiliency and break linkages in the pernicious cycle of family economic stress.     

Left-right differences on timed motor examination in children.

Age-related change in the difference between left- and right-side speed on motor examination may be an important indicator of maturation. Cortical maturation and myelination of the corpus callosum are considered to be related to increased bilateral skill and speed on timed motor tasks. We compared left minus right foot, hand, and finger speed differences using the Revised Physical and Neurological Assessment for Subtle Signs (PANESS; Denckla, 1985); examining 130 typically developing right-handed children (65 boys, 65 girls) ages 7-14. Timed tasks included right and left sets of 20 toe taps, 10 toe-heel alternation sequences, 20 hand pats, 10 hand pronate-supinate sets, 20 finger taps, and 5 sequences of each finger-to-thumb apposition. For each individual, six difference scores between left- and right-sided speeded performances of timed motor tasks were analyzed. Left-right differences decreased significantly with age on toe tapping, heel-toe alternations, hand pronation-supination, finger repetition, and finger sequencing. There were significant gender effects for heel-toe sequences (boys showing a greater left-right difference than girls), and a significant interaction between age and gender for hand pronation-supination, such that the magnitude of the left-right difference was similar for younger, compared with older girls, while the difference was significantly larger for younger, compared to older boys. Speed of performing right and left timed motor tasks equalizes with development; for some tasks, the equalization occurs earlier in girls than in boys.     

Cognitive Deficits in the Early Stages of Alzheimer's Disease

ABSTRACT— Evidence from longitudinal, experimental, and neuroimaging studies converge to indicate that psychological functions other than episodic memory are affected very early in the course of Alzheimer's disease and, indeed, may predate or influence the apparent memory deficits. Changes in personality and difficulty in executive function, especially in terms of attentional and inhibitory control, are especially prominent. Deficits in other types of memory (i.e., semantic memory, conditioning) can also be detected in the early stages of the disease. It is time to update existing diagnostic criteria for this form of dementia in terms of current knowledge of multiple and interacting brain systems.     

BDNF reverses the CTA memory deficits produced by inhibition of protein synthesis

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is an essential protein synthesis product that has emerged as one of the most potent molecular mediators of not only central synaptic plasticity, but also behavioral interactions between an organism and its environment. Our previous studies on the insular cortex (IC), a region of the temporal cortex implicated in the acquisition and storage of conditioned taste aversion (CTA), have demonstrated that intracortical microinfusion of BDNF induces a lasting potentiation of synaptic efficacy in the projection from the basolateral nucleus of the amygdala (Bla) to the IC of adult rats in vivo. Recently, we found that intracortical microinfusion of BDNF previous to CTA training enhances the retention of this task. In this work, we present experimental data showing that acute intracortical delivery of BDNF (2 microg/2 microl per side) reverses the deficit in CTA memory caused by inhibition of insular cortex protein synthesis due to anisomycin administration (100 microg/microl per side) in male adult Wistar rats. These findings suggest that BDNF is a protein synthesis product essential for neocortical long-term memory storage.