Data from a multi-stage quota sample which includes 528 respondents aged 55 and over with at least one living sibling are used to examine instrumental support (financial, help during illness, other) from siblings, the perception of siblings as a source of support if needed (in a crisis, long-term illness, coresidence), and the characteristics of respondents and their sibling networks associated with receiving help and perceiving help to be available. A minority of respondents have received sibling support, and a majority perceive siblings to be available in a crisis. Those with two or more siblings are more likely to have received help and to perceive siblings as available than those with one sibling. Significant differences by gender, marital status, parent status, and geographic proximity are discussed with reference to models of support, particularly the functional-specificity of relationships model.

Data collected on a national sample of 714 respondents aged 55 years and over were used to investigate predisposition to self-health care. Three different indicators of self-health care were employed in this work, including a measure of actual self-care behavior (ASCB), a behavioral indicator, and two attitudinal indicators, normative self-care response (NSCR) and global self-care. In OLS regression modeling, predisposing characteristics from the health-behavior model yielded levels of variance consistent with those found in the extant literature on health- and social-services utilization among elderly Americans. Age showed limited utility as an explanatory variable; it appeared as a direct effect only on global self-care. Race was the only variable to achieve a statistically significant effect on NSCR, and being female showed direct effects on ASCB and global self-care.

Recent longitudinal data indicating that arthritis is a major contributor to disability in elderly persons are based on self-reported diagnostic information. This longitudinal study included baseline physical examinations of joints of 541 persons over age 60. Previous results from a cross-sectional multivariate model of disability in this sample found that joint impairment (and, its absence, arthritis pain) explained a significant proportion of variance in overall disability. We have retested this model using generalized estimation equations (GEE) analysis to estimate the effect of joint impairment and arthritis pain on baseline and Year 2 disability. Findings indicate that baseline joint impairment contributes substantially to longitudinal disability. If direct measures of baseline joint impairment are unavailable, concurrent self-reported arthritis pain also predicts longitudinal disability well. These findings indicate that longitudinal studies should monitor arthritis pain and that symptomatic arthritis is a risk factor for future disability.

The effect of aging on fatal accident characteristics of male and female drivers was investigated using Finnish fatal-accident case study material from the period 1984-1990. Age-bound changes in accident characteristics (e.g., increase of at-fault accidents and of collisions in intersections) appeared in both sexes but seemed to affect female drivers at an earlier age and to a higher degree. When the sexes differed in accident characteristics, those of female drivers were more like the ones typically found in older drivers. The female drivers were also both quantitatively and qualitatively less experienced as drivers than their male counterparts. Thus, the lower resistance of women to the effects of aging on driving may be explained by their lower skill level. In future cohorts of old drivers, decrease of sex differences in experience will presumably attenuate the sex differences in accident characteristics.

Activity theory and the role enhancement hypothesis predict that multiple role involvement in late life is linked to greater psychological well-being, but the disengagement hypothesis and the role change hypothesis anticipate a negative association between these variables. In this study, the association between multiple roles and psychological well-being is tested among adults age 60 and over from a national sample. Three measures of well-being are regressed on background variables, number of roles (from among employee, spouse, parent, volunteer, homemaker, grandparent, caregiver, and student), and interaction terms. Multiple roles are associated with higher life satisfaction and self-efficacy and lower depressive symptoms. A significant interaction shows larger regression coefficients for roles among men than women on life satisfaction, and a three-way interaction indicates a stronger association of roles with self-efficacy for Black men than the other three gender-ethnicity combinations. Findings support the role enhancement hypothesis and the activity perspective among older adults.

Age-related differences in prospective memory were examined in a laboratory-based task in which younger and older adults performed different actions whenever a semantically defined target word occurred in the context of a free-association task. Requirements for self-initiated retrieval operations were manipulated by presenting target words that were typical or atypical instances (e.g., milk vs ink) of a given semantic category (liquid). The results showed that age differences in prospective memory were accentuated when atypical items were used as targets, but reduced when highly typical targets were presented. Furthermore, age differences were not limited to remembering when to perform action, but young subjects also showed better performance in remembering what was to be done. These findings indicate that the magnitude of age difference in prospective memory interacts with task complexity, and support the view that prospective memory failures are accentuated in tasks with high resource demands on self-initiated retrieval operations.

The hypothesis that elderly individuals are less likely than young adults to connect target and contextual information was tested. Young and elderly adults were presented with a number of slides, each of which contained a word superimposed in the center of a background picture of a landscape or cityscape. Half of the subjects were told to remember the words and half were told to remember the word-and-background pairs. All subjects were then tested for their recognition memory of the word-and-background pairs. The results indicate that elderly adults have greater difficulty than young adults remembering the connections between words and background pictures but that this occurs whether the pictures are target information or contextual information. Therefore, the results of this study provide no support for the notion that elderly adults have a specific contextual encoding deficit.

A music-facilitated psychoeducational strategy was developed as a cost-effective and accessible intervention for older adults experiencing symptoms of depression, distress, and anxiety. Thirty older adults who had been diagnosed with major or minor depressive disorder were randomly assigned to one of three 8-week conditions: (1) a home-based program where participants learned music listening stress reduction techniques at weekly home visits by a music therapist; (2) a self-administered program where participants applied these same techniques with moderate therapist intervention (a weekly telephone call); or (3) a wait list control. Participants in both music conditions performed significantly better than the controls on standardized tests of depression, distress, self-esteem, and mood. These improvements were clinically significant and maintained over a 9-month follow-up period. The potential for this type of intervention with homebound elders and others who have limited access to services is discussed.

Our hypothesis was that older adults are less likely than younger adults to acknowledge dysphoria or anhedonia even at the same level of depression. Study subjects were 3,141 participants in Baltimore, Maryland, and 3,469 participants in the Durham-Piedmont region of North Carolina who had complete data on symptoms of depression active in the one month prior to interview, as well as several covariates thought to be related to depression. The effect of age on the endorsement of the dysphoria/anhedonia stem question from the section on Major Depression in the Diagnostic Interview Schedule was estimated in the two independently gathered samples employing structural equations with a measurement model. The results indicate that, even accounting for differences due to overall level of depressive symptoms, as well as gender, minority status, educational attainment, marital status, employment status, and cognitive impairment, dysphoria was less likely to be endorsed by persons 65 years of age and older. This bias against older adults may account in part for the low rates of Major Depression reported for older persons from epidemiologic studies employing the standard diagnostic criteria.