Since the global item of subjective health has emerged as a strong predictor of important health outcomes such as mortality, there have been many attempts to uncover its correlates. In this study, we tested whether personality as assessed via the five-factor model of personality predicted subjective health when physician-rated health and depression were controlled for. We analyzed a cohort of 362 German community-dwelling 60-year-olds from the first wave of the ongoing Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study on Aging. We found that neuroticism, but none of the other four personality factors, predicted subjective health. However, the association between neuroticism and subjective health was mediated by aging self-stereotypes (attitudes toward oneself as an aging person), which in recent studies have been shown to influence older individuals' health behaviors and functional health. The results indicate that those high in neuroticism tend to have more negative aging self-stereotypes; these aging self-stereotypes, in turn, seem to affect how those individuals globally perceive their own health. Unlike many predictors of subjective health, such as age, gender, socio-cultural differences, actual health, or personality traits, negative attitudes about one's own aging may be modified through adequate intervention.
Although it has been suggested that the delayed realization of intended actions should benefit from appropriate intention planning, empirical evidence on this issue is scarce. In three experiments, we examined whether and which planning aids provided in the intention formation phase affect delayed intention realization in young and old adults. One finding was that intention planning directly affected delayed intention realization: instructing participants to include the cue for appropriate intention initiation in their plans benefited delayed performance. Another finding was that older adults' performance was improved when they were guided in structuring their plan in combination with guidance in implementing this plan after a delay. In sum, the results point to the importance of plan-related factors for understanding the delayed realization of intended actions.
Quality of life (QOL) is increasingly being suggested as a crucial outcome variable for interventions that aim to maintain or improve health and psychological resources in old age. Currently, two main approaches to measuring QOL can be distinguished: (1) the sQOL approach which measures an individual’s subjective evaluation of his or her overall life situation and QOL; (2) the oQOL approach that infers QOL of an individual from the outside, e.g., via measurement of health impairments. Both approaches, however, are problematic: In the first case, a large majority of individuals report relatively high levels of sQOL that are sometimes in stark contrast to observable impairments (known as the well-being paradox; Staudinger, 2000 ). This suggests that improving impaired resources does not necessarily lead to improved sQOL (although there may be positive effects on the autonomy of these individuals). The second approach is problematic because improved oQOL leads only to an increase in self-reported overall sQOL under very rare conditions – and one cannot assume that an increase in resources necessarily has led or will lead to higher levels of sQOL. Therefore, we propose a new, functional quality of life (fQOL) approach to determine quality of life. It combines the existing approaches by linking the subjective representations of objectively measurable resources to their functional value for pursuing individually meaningful activities and goals. From this model, fQOL-improving interventions as well as methods to evaluate the effectiveness of QOL-interventions can be derived.
BackgroundThe proportion of older people with advanced dementia who will die in nursing homes is constantly growing. However, little is known about the dying phase, the type of symptoms, the management of symptoms and the quality of life and dying in people with advanced dementia. The ZULIDAD (Zurich Life and Death with Advanced Dementia) study aims at extending the current scientific knowledge by providing first data from Switzerland.MethodsThe ZULIDAD study employs a prospective design to study nursing home residents with advanced dementia for three years or until their death in eleven nursing homes in Zurich. Observational data from quarterly questionnaires for relatives and primary nurses is combined with data from the Resident Assessment Instrument – Minimum Data Set (RAI-MDS). Special focus is put on 1) the cross-sectional analysis of baseline and post-mortem data regarding quality of life and quality of dying and how the perceptions of these measures differ between relatives and primary nurses, 2) the longitudinal analyses of established health outcome measures (e.g., EOLD, MSSE, BISAD, QUALID) in order to understand their trajectories and 3) international comparisons of cross-sectional and longitudinal data.DiscussionThe ZULIDAD study is one of the few existing prospective studies on end-of-life care in dementia and it is the first prospective study to describe the situation in Switzerland. Its multi-perspective approach allows a comprehensive approximation to central health outcome measures at the end of life such as pain, suffering or quality of life. Providing insights into the current provision of care, it can serve as a basis for improving dementia end-of-life care in Switzerland and internationally.
Memory for activities to be performed in the future, i.e., prospective memory, such as remembering to take medication or remembering to give a colleague a message, is a pervasive real world memory task that has recently begun to attract the attention of numerous researchers. Age effects in prospective memory have been found particularly in complex paradigms requiring participants to remember to switch between several sub-tasks in a limited time period (e.g., Kliegel, McDaniel, & Einstein, 2000). Here, most of the older adults tend to try to complete one or two subtasks and to forget the prospective instruction to work on all sub-tasks. Since recent findings in this context show that one profits from tips regarding the relevant task's salience in complex double-tasks, it seems likely that age effects in prospective memory tasks might also be due to the lack of information about the salience of the prospective task. To test this hypothesis, the salience of the prospective task was varied in the present study with 104 young and old participants by providing motivational incentives to interrupt and switch during the introduction phase (plan formation) as well as during the execution phase. Also, interindividual differences regarding non-executive as well as executive cognitive resources were analyzed, thus allowing estimation of the relationship between these factors and (age-related) performance in complex prospective remembering. The results show age effects in favour of the younger group in all task components of the complex prospective multi-task. In contrast, none of the groups profited significantly from the present experimental manipulation of motivational incentives. Finally, in regression analyses, particularly planning (i.e. intention formation) was found to be a significant predictor of intention execution, explaining most of the age-related variance. In sum, our results specifically highlight the fundamental importance of adequately planning the complex intention and do not support the hypothesis that age-related decrements in performance are reflecting a lack of task salience in the present complex prospective memory paradigm. AbstractMemory for activities to be performed in the future, i.e., prospective memory, such as remembering to take medication or remembering to give a colleague a message, is a pervasive real world memory task that has recently begun to attract the attention of numerous researchers. Age effects in prospective memory have been found particularly in complex paradigms requiring participants to remember to switch between several sub-tasks in a limited time period (e.g., Kliegel, McDaniel, & Einstein, 2000). Here, most of the older adults tend to try to complete one or two subtasks and to forget the prospective instruction to work on all sub-tasks. Since recent findings in this context show that one profits from tips regarding the relevant task's salience in complex double-tasks, it seems likely that age effects in prospective memory tasks might also be due to the lack of info...
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