Journals of Gerontology Series B-Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences最新文献

Objectives: The present study expands on previous research by examining whether the spouse's retirement affects individual depression both directly, by the changes in individual health investment, and indirectly, through the social interaction effect of the couples' depression.

Methods: Using the panel data from the 2010-2018 China Family Panel Studies, we investigate the direct and indirect spillover effects of the spouse's retirement on depression among Chinese urban-worker couples (men aged 50-70, women aged 40-60; n = 10,466). To address the potential endogeneity and reflect the social interaction effect of the couples' depression, we combine the Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity method with simultaneous equations.

Results: Overall, a spouse's retirement would improve an individual's depression, with the direct spillover dominating compared to the indirect spillover. Gender heterogeneity indicates that husbands' depression is improved by wives' retirement mainly because husbands might receive more healthcare and companionship provided by their retired wives, while wives' depression is aggravated by husbands' retirement because of the decline in household income and the lesser health investment. This difference is more evident when wives retire earlier and both spouses retire in the same year. With the spouse's retirement years increasing, husbands' depression improves and wives' depression declines each year. Moreover, spouses' depression is significantly interactive, and wives' depression is more vulnerable to husbands' depression.

Discussion: The results highlight that the health spillover effects of the spouse's retirement need greater attention in future research and retirement reform.

Objectives: Social inequalities in mortality are poorly studied in much of the Asia-Pacific. Using data from harmonized nationally representative longitudinal health and aging surveys our study systematically assesses mortality disparities across 3 standardized measures of socioeconomic status in 7 Asia-Pacific countries.

Methods: We used data from multiple waves of 7 representative sample surveys: the Health, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, the Indonesian Family Life Survey, the New Zealand Health, Work and Retirement survey, the Korean Longitudinal Study on Ageing and the Health, Aging and Retirement in Thailand survey, and the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement. We use Cox proportional hazards modeling to examine how the hazard of mortality differs across domains of social stratification including educational attainment, wealth, and occupational status across countries.

Results: We found consistent and pervasive gradients in mortality risk in the high-income countries by all available measures of social stratification. In contrast, patterns of inequality in adult mortality in middle-income and recently transitioned high-income countries investigated varied depending on the measure of social stratification, with strong gradients by wealth but mixed gradients by education.

Discussion: Analyzing social gradients in mortality in the Asia-Pacific shows that inequalities, especially wealth-based inequalities, in later-life health are present across the region, and that the magnitude of social gradients in mortality is overall larger in high-income countries as compared to middle-income countries.

Objectives: This daily diary study examined associations between awareness of age-related change (AARC) and satisfaction/frustration of basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness in a sample of midlife and older adults. We expected that greater satisfaction and lower frustration of needs would be associated with higher AARC-gains and lower AARC-losses. We also examined whether within-person associations of need satisfaction/frustration with AARC were moderated by age.

Methods: Participants (N = 152; aged 53+) completed measures of AARC and basic psychological need satisfaction and frustration on their smartphones for 10 consecutive days. Data were analyzed using multilevel models, with time-varying basic need satisfaction/frustration variables disaggregated into between-person and within-person components.

Results: On days participants reported higher than usual overall satisfaction of needs, and lower than usual frustration of needs, AARC-gains was higher, and AARC-losses was lower. Analysis of individual needs showed that autonomy and competence were more consistently related to higher AARC-gains and lower AARC-losses than relatedness. Within-person autonomy satisfaction was more strongly (negatively) associated with AARC-losses at older ages.

Discussion: Findings suggest that daily experiences related to satisfaction and frustration of goals related to autonomy and competence in particular may be proximal antecedents of short-term variation in AARC.

Objectives: We examine rural-urban differences between internet use and cognitive functioning among older Chinese adults and the mediating role of perceived social support networks across rural and urban areas.

Methods: Data were from the 2016 and 2018 waves of the Chinese Longitudinal Aging Social Survey (N = 9,591). Ordinary least squares regression and mediation analyses were used to examine the specific hypotheses.

Results: General internet use was significantly associated with improved cognitive functioning among older adults in the overall sample. Social support networks mediated the relationship between general internet use and cognitive functioning, but only for older adults living in rural areas. After disaggregating internet use into specific online activities, watching shows was associated with better cognitive functioning for older adults living in urban areas. For those in rural areas, chatting was positively associated with cognitive functioning, while playing games was negatively associated with cognitive functioning.

Discussion: We showed that social support mediates the relationship between internet use and cognitive functioning differently in rural and urban areas. Cognitive benefits derived from specific types of online activities also depend on their residence. These findings suggest that efforts aimed at improving internet use among rural older adults may be more fruitful if they focus on building social opportunities for older adults.

Objectives: Theoretical perspectives on aging suggest that when people experience declines in later life, they often selectively focus on maintaining aspects of their lives that are most meaningful and important to them. The social domain is one of these selected areas. The current study examines people's reports of control over their daily stressors over 10 years, predicting that the declines in control that are often observed in later life will not be observed for stressors involving interpersonal conflict and tensions with social partners.

Methods: Adults ranging from 35 to 86 years old at baseline (N = 1,940), from the National Study of Daily Experiences, reported control over interpersonal and noninterpersonal daily stressors across 8 consecutive days at 2 time points, about 10 years apart.

Results: Findings from multilevel models indicate that for noninterpersonal stressors, perceived control decreased over time. In contrast, perceived control over interpersonal conflicts and tensions remained robust over time. No cross-sectional baseline age differences were found for levels of interpersonal and noninterpersonal stressor control.

Discussion: Results are consistent with socioemotional selectivity and underscore the importance of interpersonal relationships in later adulthood. Understanding how people select and preserve certain aspects of control in their daily life can help guide efforts toward maximizing gains and minimizing losses in domains that matter most to people as they grow older.

Objectives: Few studies to date have investigated the potential mechanisms linking childhood friendship experiences to late-life depressive symptoms. This study examines the association of childhood friendship experiences with depressive symptoms among older adults and the mediating effects of social disconnectedness and cognitive function.

Methods: A retrospective cohort analysis was performed using longitudinal data from a sample of 8,745 participants aged 60 years and above in the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study from 2013 to 2018. The causal association of childhood friendship experiences with depressive symptoms and the mediating roles of social disconnectedness and cognitive function were estimated using marginal structural models and the inverse odds ratio weighting method. Mediation proportions and confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated using a bootstrap resampling method.

Results: Respondents with greater childhood friendship deficits were more likely to have depressive symptoms (odds ratio: 1.19, 95% CI: 1.11, 1.26) than those with more favorable friendship experiences during childhood. The causal mediation analysis revealed that social disconnectedness, cognitive function, and their combination partially mediated the association of childhood friendship experiences with depressive symptoms by 15.70% (95% CI: 8.66%-24.17%), 17.18 % (95% CI: 7.61%-30.00%), 28.35% (95% CI: 17.75%-42.56%), respectively.

Discussion: Friendship experiences during childhood were related to the risk of depressive symptoms in older Chinese adults; more importantly, social disconnectedness and cognitive function partially mediated this association. Thus, improving social engagement and cognitive function in older adults could alleviate the accumulated disadvantages due to childhood friendship deficits and help to improve their psychological well-being.

Objectives: Prospective associations between coping and all-cause mortality risk are understudied, particularly among nonmedical samples. We assessed independent and joint associations of multiple components of the transactional stress and coping model with all-cause mortality in a cohort of community-dwelling men. We were particularly interested in how coping effort related to mortality.

Methods: Participants included 743 men from the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study who completed 1+ stress and coping assessment in 1993-2002 (baseline age: M = 68.4, standard deviation [SD] = 7.1) and had mortality follow-up through 2020. The Brief California Coping Inventory assessed coping with a past-month stressor. Cox regression evaluated associations of problem stressfulness, coping strategies, total coping effort, and coping efficiency with all-cause mortality risk.

Results: Over a mean follow-up of 16.7 years (SD = 7.1), 473 (64%) men died. Problem stressfulness was not associated with mortality risk (hazard ratio [HR]: 1.07, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.98-1.17), adjusted for demographics and health conditions. When examining coping via specific strategies, only social coping was associated with higher mortality risk (HR: 1.15, 95% CI: 1.05-1.26) after Bonferroni correction. Total coping effort was associated with 14% greater risk of all-cause mortality (95% CI: 1.04-1.26), independent of problem stressfulness, demographics, and health conditions. Coping efficiency, a benefit-cost ratio of coping efficacy to total coping effort, was not associated with mortality risk in adjusted models.

Discussion: Total coping effort may be an important indicator for longevity among aging men, above and beyond problem stressfulness and specific coping strategies, which have been the foci in prior research.

Objectives: Black women are at high risk for discrimination and cognitive impairment in late life. It is not known if discrimination is a risk factor for cognitive decline in Black women and if so, what factors are protective against the adverse cognitive effects of discrimination. Using the biopsychosocial model of gendered racism, we determined if discrimination is associated with poorer cognition in midlife Black women and if social support and/or spirituality would protect against the deleterious effects of discrimination on cognition.

Methods: Participants were midlife Black women (N = 669) from the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation. Discrimination was measured by the Everyday Discrimination scale. Cognitive outcomes included episodic memory, processing speed, and working memory. Total social support, emotional support, instrumental support, and spirituality were assessed as protective factors.

Results: Contrary to expectations, structural equation modeling indicated that discrimination was associated with better immediate recall. For women with more emotional support, greater discrimination was associated with better immediate recall than for women with lower emotional support. Spirituality was not a significant moderator in the association between discrimination and cognition.

Discussion: Discrimination had unexpected positive associations with learning and attention-based cognitive skills for midlife Black women. Discrimination might enhance vigilance, which could be facilitated by higher levels of emotional support. There is an opportunity for clinical and public health interventions for cognitive health and discrimination focused on Black women to better incorporate emotional support as a coping resource.

Objectives: Multimorbidity resilience reflects older adults' ability to cope with, adapt to, and rebound from its adverse effects through mobilizing resources. This study revised the multidomain Multimorbidity Resilience Index based on the Lifecourse Model of Multimorbidity Resilience referring to the life situations of older adults in rural China to measure the multimorbidity resilience from 2018 to 2021 and to explore factors influencing multimorbidity resilience from the perspective of Life Course theory.

Methods: This study used the seventh and eighth waves of longitudinal data (2018-2021) collected in Anhui, China. Older adults (945) with 2 or more chronic diseases were selected, and 1,201 (person-year) observations were collected and studied. A mixed linear model examined the effects of early- and later-factors on multimorbidity resilience.

Results: Multimorbidity resilience was negatively correlated with age and decreased faster with age after the outbreak of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Married older adults have higher multimorbidity resilience. Exposure to hunger was associated with lower multimorbidity resilience when later factors were considered. Self-reported health before age 15, access to medical resources, and multimorbidity resilience were positively correlated. In addition, this study verified the relationship between multimorbidity resilience and the number of chronic diseases, exercise frequency, religious beliefs, self-reported health, and economic satisfaction, among other factors.

Discussion: The associations between life course factors and multimorbidity resilience emphasize the long-term impact of early-life experience and the adverse effects of increasing age, especially after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings will drive policy development from a life course perspective encompassing prevention and follow-up treatment to promote active aging.

Objectives: Despite the potential importance of the neighborhood social environment for cognitive health, the connection between neighborhood characteristics and dementia remains unclear. This study investigated the association between the prospective risk of dementia and three distinct aspects of neighborhood social environment: socioeconomic deprivation, disorder, and social cohesion. We also examined whether objective and subjective aspects of individual-level social isolation may function as mediators.

Methods: Leveraging data from the Health and Retirement Study (2006-2018; N = 9,251), we used Cox proportional hazards models to examine the association between time-to-dementia incidence and each neighborhood characteristic, adjusting for covariates and the propensity to self-select into disadvantaged neighborhoods. We used inverse odds weighting to decompose significant total effects of neighborhood characteristics into mediational effects of objective and subjective social isolation.

Results: The risk of dementia was associated with deprivation and disorder but not low cohesion. In deprived neighborhoods, individuals had an 18% increased risk of developing dementia (cause-specific hazard ratio [CHR] = 1.18, 95% CI: 1.02 to 1.38), and those in disordered areas had a 27% higher risk (CHR = 1.27, 95% CI: 1.03 to 1.59). 20% of the disorder's effects were mediated by subjective social isolation, while the mediational effects of objective isolation were nonsignificant. Deprivation's total effects were not partitioned into mediational effects given its nonsignificant associations with the mediators.

Discussion: Neighborhood deprivation and disorder may increase middle to older adults' risks of dementia. The disorder may adversely affect cognitive health through increasing loneliness. Our results suggest a clear need for dementia prevention targeting upstream neighborhood contexts, including the improvement of neighborhood conditions to foster social integration among residents.