Although family caregiving among non-Hispanic Whites (NHW) has been studied extensively, relatively little is known about the caregiving experience in Mexican American (MA) families. This article compares 196 MA caregivers to 165 NHW caregivers and describes differences in the caregiving structure and caregiving experience. For caregiving structure, more MA caregivers were adult children even though the elder had a living spouse, MA caregivers provided less help, fewer MAs lived with elders, and MA elders had better functional abilities, in spite of having similar health problems to their NHW counterparts. For caregiving experience, MA caregivers had and used less social support, felt less social restriction and less change in elder-caregiver-family relationships, had poorer health, and evaluated their role performance better than NHW caregivers.

The population of older adults worldwide is growing, with an urgent need for approaches that develop and maintain intrinsic capacity consistent with healthy aging. Theory and empirical research converge on feeling safe as central to healthy aging. However, there has been limited attention to resources that cultivate feeling safe to support healthy aging. Nostalgia, “a sentimental longing for one’s past,” is established as a source of comfort in response to social threat, existential threat, and self-threat. Drawing from extant theory and research, we build on these findings to position nostalgia as a regulatory resource that cultivates feeling safe and contributes to intrinsic capacity to support healthy aging. Using a narrative review method, we: (a) characterize feeling safe as a distinct affective dimension, (b) summarize the character of nostalgia in alignment with feeling safe, (c) propose a theoretical account of the mechanisms through which nostalgia cultivates feeling safe, (d) highlight the contribution of nostalgia to feeling safe and emotional, physiological, and behavioral regulatory capabilities in healthy aging, and (e) offer conclusions and direction for research.

Background Dyads receiving palliative care for advanced heart failure are at risk for the loss of feeling safe, experienced as a fractured sense of coherence, discontinuity in sense of self and relationships, and strained social connections and altered roles. However, few theory-based interventions have addressed feeling safe in this vulnerable population. Purpose The purpose of this article is to describe the development of the Nostalgic Remembering Intervention to strengthen feeling safe and promote adaptive physiological and psychological regulation in dyads receiving palliative care for heart failure. Conclusions Systematic intervention development is essential to understand what, for whom, why, and how an intervention works in producing outcomes. Program theory provided a systematic approach to the development of the Nostalgic Remembering Intervention, including conceptualization of the problem targeted by the intervention, specification of critical inputs and conditions that operationalize the intervention, and understanding the mediating processes leading to expected outcomes. Clinical Implications Creating a foundation for cardiovascular nursing research and practice requires continued, systematic development of theory-based interventions to best meet the needs of dyads receiving palliative care for heart failure. The development of the Nostalgic Remembering Intervention to strengthen feeling safe in dyads provides a novel and relevant approach.