A new Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) designed specifically for rating depression in the elderly was tested for reliability and validity and compared with the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRS-D) and the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS). In constructing the GDS a 100-item questionnaire was administered to normal and severely depressed subjects. The 30 questions most highly correlated with the total scores were then selected and readministered to new groups of elderly subjects. These subjects were classified as normal, mildly depressed or severely depressed on the basis of Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDC) for depression. The GDS, HRS-D and SDS were all found to be internally consistent measures, and each of the scales was correlated with the subject's number of RDC symptoms. However, the GDS and the HRS-D were significantly better correlated with RDC symptoms than was the SDS. The authors suggest that the GDS represents a reliable and valid self-rating depression screening scale for elderly populations.

In three experiments subjects given either impression formation or memory task instructions read a series of behavior descriptions that either did or did not contain a highly distinctive item. In each study subjects given impression formation instructions recalled significantly more items than did subjects in the memory condition. Subjects given impression formation instructions were more likely to recall a distinctive item, but presence of a distinctive item in the stimulus list had little effect on recall of the other items. Results are discussed in terms of the organization of information acquired during the process of impression development.

The authors examined whether aviation expertise reduces age differences in a laboratory task that was similar to routine air traffic control (ATC) communication. In Experiment 1, older and younger pilots and nonpilots read typical ATC messages (e.g., commands to change aircraft heading). After each message, they read back (repeated) the commands, which is a routine ATC procedure requiring short-term memory. Ss also performed less domain-relevant tasks. Expertise eliminated age differences in repeating heading commands, but did not reduce age differences for the less relevant tasks. In Experiment 2, expertise reduced but did not eliminate age differences in repeating heading commands from spoken messages. The results suggest that expertise compensates age declines in resources when the task is highly domain relevant.

Prescription medication nonadherence among the elderly is a serious medical problem. Nonadherence is primarily caused by poor communication between health professionals and elderly patients. More specifically, nonadherence often reflects the inability of patients to understand and remember their medication instructions. Therefore, adherence can be increased by designing instructions that enable elders to easily construct a clear and simple mental model of how to take their medication. Inexpensive microcomputer-based hardware and software makes it possible for pharmacists to provide elderly patients with effective instructions.

We examined adult age differences in the mental representation of situations and how readers update this representation during narrative comprehension. Older and younger adults memorized a building layout and then read narratives about a protagonist's actions in this building. The narratives contained critical sentences that described the protagonist moving from one room (the "source room") into another (the "goal room"), through an unmentioned path room. Each critical sentence was followed by a target sentence referring to an object in one of these rooms. Half of the target sentences explicitly mentioned the room containing this object and half did not. Reading time increased when the target object was more distant from the protagonist and when the room containing the object was not mentioned, suggesting that readers tracked the protagonist's location in the layout and allocated resources in order to maintain coherence in the situation model. Older adults' reading times differentially slowed with distance, and older readers who more accurately understood the narrative differentially slowed when the location of the target object was not mentioned. Finally, the more accurate readers (older and younger) slowed primarily when updating was most difficult (i.e., both when the room containing the object was not mentioned and for more distant objects). While these findings reveal qualitative similarity in how older and younger readers update spatially organized situation models, they also suggest that older readers must sometimes allocate more resources to this updating process in order to maintain comprehension.