Hiding in plain sight: Older U.S. purpose exemplars

ABSTRACT

Despite significant research on purpose in adolescence and early adulthood, little is known about purpose in older adults. This paper defines purpose as ongoing commitment to and sustained action toward goals that are meaningful to the self and aim to contribute beyond the self. This study of purpose in later life draws on interviews of 102 respondents drawn from a U.S. nationally representative sample of 1198 men and women aged 50–92. Eighteen interviewees are identified as exemplars of purpose beyond the self and are matched with a comparison group of non-purposeful peers. Interview coding revealed that, in contrast to the non-purposeful comparison group, the purpose exemplars describe their lives as including several interconnected sources of well-being: purpose beyond the self, positive relationships, positive life engagement, a sense of competence, and freedom balanced with the desire to contribute. Implications for practitioners and the public are discussed.     

Does Age Moderate the Relation Between Social Negativity and Psychological Distress?: A Meta-Analytic Investigation

Recently, Finch et al. (Journal of Personality, 1999) reported the results of a meta-analysis in which social negativity was demonstrated to be positively related to psychological distress. In the present investigation, we employed meta-analytic techniques to test competing hypotheses as to whether age amplifies or dampens the relation of social negativity and psychological distress. A total of 104 effect sizes (e.g., concurrent correlations between self-report measures of social negativity and psychological distress) from 53 independent samples were extracted from 46 journal articles. Contrary to hypotheses, the relation between social negativity and psychological distress was not significantly different for samples of older (60 + years) and younger (<60 years) adults. An explanation was provided for why the present meta-analysis and previous narrative reviews have resulted in discrepant conclusions about negativity effects.     

Aging and the use of context in ambiguity resolution: complex changes from simple slowing

Older and younger adults' abilities to use context information rapidly during ambiguity resolution were investigated. In Experiments 1 and 2, younger and older adults heard ambiguous words (e.g., fires) in sentences where the preceding context supported either the less frequent or more frequent meaning of the word. Both age groups showed good context use in offline tasks, but only young adults demonstrated rapid use of context in cross-modal naming. A 3rd experiment demonstrated that younger and older adults had similar knowledge about the contexts used in Experiments 1 and 2. The experiment results were simulated in 2 computational models in which different patterns of context use were shown to emerge from varying a single speed parameter. These results suggest that age-related changes in processing efficiency can modulate context use during language comprehension.     

Decreasing entry into a restricted area using a visual barrier

Wandering is a difficult-to-manage behavior problem for individuals with cognitive impairments that can jeopardize safety if an individual enters a hazardous area or becomes lost. This study investigated the effects of a cloth barrier on entry into an unsafe area. The cloth barrier reduced entry into the restricted area and had high treatment acceptability.     

Effectiveness of Cognitive-Behavioral Insomnia Treatment in a Community Sample of Older Individuals: More Questions than Conclusions

Effectiveness of two modified stimulus control insomnia interventions plus daily sleep self-monitoring for managing insomnia was investigated in a community sample of older adults. Significant post intervention improvement was observed in both interventions as well as in a self-monitoring only control condition. This unexpected finding led us to question the role of self-monitoring as a potential mediator of therapeutic change. Therefore, we compared long-term follow-up data from treated participants to data from similarly poor sleepers who only completed the questionnaire battery at Pre-test and long term follow-up, with no intervening treatment or self-monitoring. Both groups of poor sleepers reduced their reported amount of nocturnal wakefulness. However, only treated participants improved on their perceived frequency of insomnia episodes and insomnia-related distress. Our findings have implications both for the definition and the treatment of insomnia.     

Primed word-fragment completion and successive memory test performance in normal aging

Young and old subjects were investigated to examine whether: the effects of priming are influenced by aging; there is independence between primed word-fragment completion and recognition performances; and the dependence between different tests is influenced by aging. A successive test paradigm was employed involving repeated assessment of to-be-remembered words by means of recognition and primed word-fragment completion. The results show that implicit memory declines with increasing age, and that correlations between different memory tests decrease with age. The outcome suggests that age-related memory decline involves several forms of memory, including primed word-fragment completion, and is reflected in correlations between measures of implicit and explicit memory.     

What It Means to Be a Man: Aging and Anxiety in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape and That Time

One of the great writers of Twentieth-century doubt, Samuel Beckett is perhaps best known for endowing his protagonists with some of the more classic symptoms of anxiety and depression. The result is an extraordinary corpus that unfolds how the intricacies and excesses of anxiety affect the behavior of men and women involved in intimate relationships, and how that behavior is exhibited in their aging years. While this discussion of Krapp's Last Tape (1960) and That Time (1976) will explore anxiety from a specifically male point of view, the works themselves compel various responses from readers of both sexes. Both pieces also may be of interest to those concerned with the rethinking of sexual roles in intimate relationships in light of an individual's response to the physical and emotional aspects of aging.     

The Relevance of Multiculturalism for Aging

Though multiculturalists focus on race and minority status, issues of central importance to the aged, multiculturalism has not infiltrated the gerontology literature. However, since the so-called natural stages of life are cultural formations, each one a valuable creation, the topic of aging would certainly benefit from a connection to multiculturalism and its critique of the demands of assimilation.     

A Story of Her Own: Hester Lynch Piozzi's Autobiography

This essay examines the autobiography of Hester Lynch Piozzi and contextualizes her story within eighteenth-century ideologies of gender and aging. From a narrative understanding of identity, autobiographical writing serves as one of the many stories that constitute an individual's identity. This reading of Piozzi's account finds that it functions both as an act of reminiscing and as an effort to give meaning to life that was often misunderstood. Considering Piozzi as a woman who lived most of her life outside of the social and cultural expectations for a middle class female of her era, this essay suggests the importance of listening to and retelling the stories of others as well as our own.     

Captured in Time: Friendship and Aging

This essay explores the general issues of aging—loneliness, vulnerability, dispossession, disempowerment, fear of death—from a Christian perspective. Drawing on Aristotle and Aelred of Rievaulx, we argue first that Christian stories transform these issues such that we see aging as a gift rather than a threat. Second, friendships among the elderly, and between the elderly and the young, are essential to the church; we need the elderly to tell the Christian stories, to embody the church's memory, and to teach the young how to grow old and die. Finally, we make a few suggestions about how churches can approximate more closely Aelred's vision of a community of friendship.