Experimental Aging Research最新文献

Introduction: The Attentional Boost Effect (ABE) occurs whenever participants recognize stimuli paired earlier with to-be-responded targets better than stimuli earlier paired with to-be-ignored distractors or presented on their own (baseline). Previous studies showed that the ABE does not occur in older adults when the encoding time is too short (500 ms/word) or when encoding is incidental, likely due to aging-related reductions in cognitive resources or limitations of processing speed.

Method: In the present study, younger and older adults encoded words presented for 1000 ms under intentional instructions. In addition, to determine the potential impact of the retention interval, the recognition task was performed after a delay of 2 minutes (Experiment 1) or 20 minutes (Experiment 2).

Results: Under these conditions, older adults showed a significant ABE and the size of the effect was comparable to that achieved by younger adults. The magnitude of the ABE was vulnerable to the passage of time because the recognition advantage of target-paired words decreased sharply from 2 to 20 minutes.

Conclusions: Taken together, our data demonstrate that younger and older adults may have comparable ABE effects under specific conditions and are similarly sensitive to interference.

Introduction: This study aimed to assess prevalence of back pain among older people living with HIV (PLH) in rural areas of the United States (US); compare the presence of comorbidities, socioeconomic factors, and sociodemographic factors among older PLH in rural areas of the US with and without back pain; and examine the associations between back pain, depression, and QOL among older PLH in rural areas of the US.

Methods: Cross-sectional data was collected among US rural dwelling PLH of at least 50 years of age. Multiple logistic regression was performed to examine the association between back pain and depression. Multiple linear regression was performed to assess the association between back pain and QOL.

Results: A total of 38.8% (n = 164) of participants self-reported back pain. PLH with back pain were more likely to have depression (60.87%, n = 98). PLH with back pain had lower mean QOL scores (53.01 ± 18.39). Back pain was associated with greater odds of having depression (OR 1.61 [CI 0.99-2.61], p = .054) and was significantly associated with lower QOL (p < .001).

Conclusions: Prevention strategies to reduce back pain and poor HIV outcomes among PLH living in rural areas of the US are needed.

Introduction: Virtual reality devices have been widely used for the rehabilitation among older people with cognitive impairments. They enable the user to navigate in three-dimensional environments, which are constructed by a computer. Recent studies have been focused on the cognitive benefits of virtual reality for people with cognitive deficits. The current study aimed to investigate the overall impact of community-based virtual reality interventions in older adults with dementia and/or cognitive impairment.

Methods: A systematic review of the literature was conducted according to the PRISMA guidelines. Google Scholar, PubMed, Science Direct and Scopus databases were searched for the years 2010-2022.

Results: Of the 245 articles 20 met the inclusion criteria. The results of the current systematic review indicated that virtual reality improved older adults' cognitive and motor skills and increased their positive emotions while minimizing less positive ones. However, there is insufficient data of its impact on their overall quality of life.

Conclusion: There is a need to implement and evaluate interventions that examine its impact not only on cognitive functioning, but also on other aspects of older people with cognitive deficits.

Objectives: In view of the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, psychologists face a challenge to document the pandemic-related change in emotional well-being of individuals and groups and evaluate the emotional response to this fallout over time.

Methodsp: We contribute to this goal by analyzing the new CoSoWELL corpus (version 2.0), an 1.8 million-word collection of narratives written by over 1,300 older adults (55+ y.o.) in eight sessions before, during and after the global lockdown. In the narratives, we examined a range of linguistic variables traditionally associated with emotional well-being and observed signs of distress, i.e., lower positivity and heightened levels of fear, anger, and disgust.

Results: In most variables, we observed a characteristic timeline of change, i.e., a delayed (by 4 months) and abrupt drop in optimism and increase in negative emotions that reached its peak about 7 months after the lockdown and returned to pre-pandemic levels one year after. Our examination of risk factors showed that higher levels of self-reported loneliness came with elevated levels of negative emotions but did not change the timeline of emotional response to the pandemic.

Conclusions: We discuss implications of the findings for theories of emotion regulation.

Archival records of US Masters Swimming performances were examined for changes between 1981 and 2021. Both national records and top 10 swimmers were used. Substantial secular changes were found averaging 0.52%/yr, with women improving more than men and with improvements in national records greater than in the top 10. Performances by women in 2021 were at parity (national records) or near parity (top 10) with men in 1981. The results indicate that secular effects must be considered along with longitudinal age-related changes and cross-sectional cohort effects in interpreting age differences in physiological function.

Objectives: This study investigated whether race and sex moderated the relations of religious coping to telomere length (TL), a biomarker of cellular aging implicated in race-related health disparities.

Methods: Participant data were drawn from the Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity across the Life Span (HANDLS) study, which included 252 socioeconomically diverse African American and White men and women aged (30-64 years old). Cross-sectional multivariable regression analyses examined interactive associations of religious coping, race, and sex to TL, adjusting for other sociodemographic characteristics.

Results: Religious coping was unrelated to TL in this sample (p's > .05). There were no notable race or sex differences. Post hoc exploratory analyses similarly found that neither secular social support coping use nor substance use coping was associated with TL.

Conclusion: There was no evidence to support that religious coping use provided protective effects to TL in this sample of African American and White women and men. Nevertheless, future studies should use more comprehensive assessments of religious coping and intersectional identities to provide an in-depth examination of religiosity/spirituality as a potential culturally salient protective factor in cellular aging among African Americans in the context of specific chronic stressors such as discrimination.

Research question: Are semantic impairments in Alzheimer's disease (AD) partially due to deficits in spatial attention?

Methods and results: In a target detection task, both older adults (OAs) and AD individuals were facilitated by valid spatial cues, but only OAs were impaired by invalid cues compared to neutral. In a reading task, spatial cues validly or invalidly cued the location of pictures, which were related or unrelated to subsequent, centrally presented, words. OAs showed semantic priming only after valid cues, whereas AD individuals showed priming after valid and invalid cues.

Discussion: Failure to inhibit uncued locations results in processing of potentially distracting semantic information in AD.

The present study was conducted to investigate the effects of Ocimum basilicum L. (OB) extract on learning and memory impairment in aged rats. Male rats were divided into the following experimental groups: Group 1 (control): including 2 months old rats, Group 2 (aged) including 2 years old rats, Groups 3-5 (aged-OB): including 2 years old rats received 50, 100, and 150 mg/kg OB for 8 weeks by oral gavage. Aging increased the delay to find the platform but, however, decreased the time spent in the target quadrant when tested by Morris water maze (MWM). Aging also reduced the latency to enter the dark chamber in the passive avoidance (PA) test compared to the control group. Moreover, interleukin-6 (IL-6) and malondialdehyde (MDA) levels were raised in the hippocampus and cortex of aged rats. In contrast, thiol levels and enzymatic activity of superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT) significantly reduced. In addition, aging significantly reduced BDNF expression. Finally, OB administration reversed the mentioned effects. The current research showed that OB administration improves learning/memory impairment induced by aging. It also found that this plant extract protects the brain tissues from oxidative damage and neuroinflammation.

Introduction: The possible decline of cognitive functions with age has been in the focus of cognitive research in the last decades. The present study investigated effects of aging on conflict processing in a big dataset of a Stroop-inspired online training task.

Methods: We focused on the temporal dynamics of conflict processing in the light of task practice by means of inspecting delta plots and Lorenz-interference curves to gain insights on a process level.

Results: The results indicate a relatively constant increase of cognitive conflict over the course of adulthood and a decrease with practice. Furthermore, the latency of the automatic processing of conflicting information relative to the controlled processing of task-relevant information decreases relatively constantly with age. This effect is moderated by practice, that is, the relative latency of the automatic processing decreases less with age at high practice levels.

Conclusion: As such, practice seems to be able to partially counteract age-related differences in conflict processing, on a process level.

We examined whether framing younger and older adults learning goals in terms of maximizing gains or minimizing losses impacts their ability to selectively remember high-value information. Specifically, we presented younger and older adults with lists of words paired with point values and participants were either told that they would receive the value associated with each word if they recalled it on a test or that they would lose the points associated with each word if they failed to recall it on the test. We also asked participants to predict the likelihood of recalling each word to determine if younger and older adults were metacognitively aware of any potential framing effects. Results revealed that older adults expected to be more selective when their goals were framed in terms of losses, but younger adults expected to be more selective when their goals were framed in terms of gains. However, this was not the case as both younger and older adults were more selective for high-value information when their goals were framed in terms of maximizing gains compared with minimizing losses. Thus, the framing of learning goals can impact metacognitive decisions and subsequent memory in both younger and older adults.