Organizational volunteering has been touted as an effective strategy for older adults to help themselves while helping others. Extending previous reviews, we carried out a meta-analysis of the relation between organizational volunteering by late middle-aged and older adults (minimum age = 55 years old) and risk of mortality. We focused on unadjusted effect sizes (i.e., bivariate relations), adjusted effect sizes (i.e., controlling for other variables such as health), and interaction effect sizes (e.g., the joint effect of volunteering and religiosity). For unadjusted effect sizes, on average, volunteering reduced mortality risk by 47 percent with a 95% confidence interval ranging from 38% to 55%. For adjusted effect sizes, on average, volunteering reduced mortality risk by 24 percent with a 95% confidence interval ranging from 16% to 31%. For interaction effect sizes, we found preliminary support that as public religiosity increases, the inverse relation between volunteering and mortality risk becomes stronger. The discussion identified several unresolved issues and directions for future research.Key words: volunteering, mortality, moderation Word count: 11,472 Volunteering and Mortality 3Volunteering by Older Adults and Risk of Mortality: A Meta-Analysis Using insights generated from evolutionary theory, Brown and her colleagues (Brown & Brown, 2006;Brown, Nesse, Vinokur, & Smith, 2003) advanced the hypothesis that helping behavior, whatever its effect on the recipient, promotes the psychological wellbeing and health of the helper. Providing assistance to another improves relationship satisfaction and enhances stress regulation . Brown and her colleagues have shown that helping behavior among older adults is associated with accelerated recovery from depressive symptoms that accompany spousal loss (Brown, Brown, House, & Smith, 2008) and reduced mortality risk (Brown et al., 2003) even among caregivers (Brown, Smith, et al., 2009). An independent research team, using a sample of over a thousand older adults from New York City, reported similar findings for morbidity (Brown, Consedine, & Magai, 2005).Prosocial behaviors refer to intentional efforts to provide assistance to another individual or communities. Planned prosocial activities include caregiving, providing support to others, contributing to other church-goers, and volunteering. Organizational or formal volunteering is an unpaid, voluntary activity that involves ". . . taking actions within an institutional framework that potentially provides some service to one or more other people or to the community at large" (Piliavin & Siegl, 2007, p. 454). In the current meta-analysis, we examine the relation between organizational volunteering and risk of mortality among adults 55 years old and older.We chose to focus exclusively on organizational volunteering because, in contrast to helping familiar others and engaging in social activities with familiar others in informal social contexts, organizational volunteering entails helping unfamiliar others i...

Objective This study compared the impact of cognitive-behavioral therapy for pain (CBT-P), mindful awareness and acceptance treatment (M), and arthritis education (E) on day-to-day pain- and stress-related changes in cognitions, symptoms, and affect among adults with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Method 143 RA patients were randomized to one of the three treatment conditions. CBT-P targeted pain coping skills; M targeted awareness and acceptance of current experience to enhance coping with a range of aversive experiences; and E provided information regarding RA pain and its management. At pre- and post-treatment, participants completed 30 consecutive evening diaries assessing that day's pain, fatigue, pain-related catastrophizing and perceived control, morning disability, and serene and anxious affects. Results Multilevel models compared groups in the magnitude of within-person change in daily pain- and stress-reactivity from pre- to post-treatment. M yielded greater reductions than did CBT-P and E in daily pain-related catastrophizing, morning disability, and fatigue, and greater reductions in daily stress-related anxious affect. CBT-P yielded less pronounced declines in daily pain-related perceived control than did M and E. Conclusions For individuals with RA, M produces the broadest improvements in daily pain- and stress-reactivity relative to CBT-P and E. These findings also highlight the utility of a diary-based approach to evaluating the treatment-related changes in responses to daily life.

This systematic review found limited evidence to support the use of most of clinical measures of spasticity for people post-stroke. Future research examining the application and psychometric properties of these measures is warranted. Implications for Rehabilitation There is a need for objective clinical tools for measuring spasticity that are clinically feasible and easily interpreted by clinicians. This review identified various clinical measures of spasticity that have been investigated in people after stroke. Insufficient evidence of psychometric properties precludes recommending one tool over the others. Future research should focus on investigating the psychometric properties of clinical measures of spasticity.

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Objective This daily diary study of individuals with fibromyalgia (FM) examined whether morning increases in loneliness relate to worsened evening bodily pain through afternoon negative pain cognitions. Methods 220 participants with FM completed electronic diaries 4 times a day for 21 days to assess loneliness, negative pain cognitions, bodily pain, and social enjoyment. Multilevel structural equation modeling was used to examine within-person relations of morning increases in loneliness, afternoon negative pain cognitions, and evening pain, controlling for morning pain. Results On mornings when individuals experienced higher than their usual levels of loneliness, they experienced higher levels of afternoon maladaptive pain cognitions, which in turn predicted increases in evening pain above the level of morning pain. Afternoon maladaptive pain cognitions fully mediated the relations between morning loneliness and evening pain. Conclusions Lonely episodes are associated with subsequent increases in negative patterns of thinking about pain, which in turn predict subsequent increases in bodily pain within a day. Because pain cognitions mediate the loneliness—pain link, FM interventions may benefit from addressing individuals’ vulnerability to maladaptive cognitions following lonely episodes.

Objective Test the effect of exposure to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s proposed graphic images with text warning statements for cigarette packages on implicit and explicit attitudes toward smoking. Design and methods A two-session web-based study was conducted with 2192 young adults 18–25 years old. During session one, demographics, smoking behavior, and baseline implicit and explicit attitudes were assessed. Session two, completed on average 18 days later, contained random assignment to viewing one of three sets of cigarette packages, graphic images with text warnings, text warnings only, or current U.S Surgeon General’s text warnings. Participants then completed post-exposure measures of implicit and explicit attitudes. ANCOVAs tested the effect of condition on the outcomes, controlling for baseline attitudes. Results Smokers who viewed packages with graphic images plus text warnings demonstrated more negative implicit attitudes compared to smokers in the other conditions (p=.004). For the entire sample, explicit attitudes were more negative for those who viewed graphic images plus text warnings compared to those who viewed current U.S. Surgeon General’s text warnings (p=.014), but there was no difference compared to those who viewed text-only warnings. Conclusion Graphic health warnings on cigarette packages can influence young adult smokers’ implicit attitudes toward smoking.

Fibromyalgia (FM) is a chronic pain condition often resulting in functional impairments. Nonrestorative sleep is a prominent symptom of FM that is related to disability, but the day-to-day mechanisms relating the prior night’s sleep quality to next day reports of disability have not been examined. The current study examined the within-day relations among early-morning reports of sleep quality last night, late-morning reports of pain and positive and negative affect, and end-of-day reports of activity interference. Specifically, we tested whether pain, positive affect, and negative affect mediated the association between sleep quality and subsequent activity interference. Data were drawn from electronic diary reports, collected from 220 FM patients for 21 consecutive days. The direct and mediated effects at the within-person level were estimated with Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling. Results showed that pain and positive affect mediated the relation between sleep quality and activity interference. Early-morning reports of poor sleep quality last night predicted elevated levels of pain and lower levels of positive affect at late-morning, which, in turn, predicted elevated end-of-day activity interference. Of note, positive affect was a stronger mediator than pain, and negative affect was not a significant mediator. In summary, the findings identify two parallel mechanisms, pain and positive affect, through which the prior night’s sleep quality predicts disability the next day in FM patients. Further, results highlight the potential utility of boosting positive affect following a poor night’s sleep as one means of preserving daily function in FM.

Associations between infants' frontal EEG asymmetry and temperamental negative affectivity (NA) across infants' first year of life and the potential moderating role of maternal prenatal depressive symptoms were examined prospectively in infants (n = 242) of mothers at elevated risk for perinatal depression. In predicting EEG, in the context of high prenatal depressive symptoms, infant NA and frontal EEG asymmetry were negatively associated at 3 months of age and positively associated by 12 months of age. By contrast, for low depression mothers, infant NA and EEG were not significantly associated at any age. Postnatal depressive symptoms did not add significantly to the models. Dose of infants' exposure to maternal depression mattered: infants exposed either pre- or postnatally shifted from a positive association at 3 months to a negative association at 12 months; those exposed both pre- and postnatally shifted from a negative association at 3 months to a positive association at 12 months. Prenatal relative to postnatal exposure did not matter for patterns of association between NA and EEG. The findings highlight the importance of exploring how vulnerabilities at two levels of analysis, behavioral and psychophysiological, co-occur over the course of infancy and in the context of mothers' depressive symptomatology.