We examined whether the A allele of rs373863828, which is common in Samoans but rare in non-Pacific Islanders, predicts better cognition. Samoan interviewers interviewed participants who were 60 years and older, lived in the Independent State of Samoa, and had four Samoan grandparents. The AA genotype significantly predicted older Samoans' better subjective and objective cognition; it also contributed 5.9 times more than to subjective cognition and 12.3 times more than to objective cognition, in effect-size analyses. Since operates in the universal CREB system, the findings could inform general aging-cognition resilience.

This study examined whether changes in middle-aged children's perceptions of their parents' activities of daily living needs (ADL needs) were associated with changes in the mutuality of support in their relationship. A group of 366 middle-aged children in Waves 1 (2008) and 2 (2013) of the Family Exchanges Study self-reported providing and receiving tangible, emotional, and informational support to and from their = 468 parents. Increased perceived parental ADL needs were associated with increased provision of tangible and informational support to parents but not with changes in support received. Increases in perceived parental ADL needs were associated with higher incongruence for all three support types (the child providing more support than they receive).

This study examined whether one spouse's mealtime behaviors were associated with their own and their partner's depressive symptoms among older, married couples. We examined gender differences in these associations and tested marital satisfaction as a mediator of these associations. 101 couples self-reported mealtime behavior (number of meals, snacks, fast-food meals, and meals eaten alone), depressive symptoms, and marital satisfaction. Results of the Actor Partner Interdependence Model revealed a statistically significant actor effect of number of fast-food meals on depressive symptoms and a significant partner effect of number of fast-food meals and number of meals eaten alone on depressive symptoms. There were gender differences. Husbands' marital satisfaction mediated the effect of meals eaten alone on depressive symptoms. Wife's marital satisfaction mediated the effect of the husband's meals eaten alone, and wife's number of fast-food meals on the wife's depressive symptoms. Findings have implications for dyadic interventions to improve depressive symptoms.

Heightened awareness and perceived negativity of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) may increase health-related concerns about developing ADRD, also called dementia-related anxiety. Anticipating greater levels of ADRD stigma was expected to be associated with greater dementia-related anxiety. Middle-aged and older adults ( = 183, aged 40-80, = 59.57) responded to online questionnaires about anticipated ADRD stigma, ADRD exposure, dementia-related anxiety, and potential psychosocial correlates of dementia-related anxiety. Multivariate regression analyses revealed that self-perceived ADRD risk, ADRD exposure, and anticipated stigma remained significantly associated with dementia-related anxiety, after controlling for demographic variables. Reducing ADRD stigma may ease dementia-related anxiety, an area for future research.

Evidence for the relation between personality and dementia risk comes mainly from American samples. We tested whether personality-dementia links extend to populations from England and Australia. Data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA; = 6,887; Follow-up mean: 5.64 years) and the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA; = 2,778; Follow-up mean: 10.96 years) were analyzed using Cox PH models. In both samples, higher neuroticism was associated with increased dementia risk. In ELSA, lower conscientiousness was related to increased risk. In HILDA, conscientiousness had a similar effect but did not reach statistical significance. The present work found a consistent association for neuroticism and suggests similar personality-dementia links across demographic groups and high-income countries.

This article explores the influence of perceived benefits and costs on willingness to engage in social interactions in 32 young adults aged 20 to 40 years and 38 older adults aged 65 to 85 years. Results showed (1) increases in perceived benefits and importance of each relationship but decreases in perceived costs associated with increases in network centrality, (2) reduced willingness in older adults to engage with social partners for whom perceived costs outweighed benefits, and (3) perceived costs and benefits subsumed the effects of the affective qualities of social interactions. Findings support an analysis of social behavior based on the selective engagement theory (Hess, 2014), with selection effects in willingness to engage in social interactions related to perceived benefits and costs.

Awareness of age-related change (AARC) refers to an individual's conscious knowledge about the gains and losses resulting from growing older. Personality traits reflect dispositional patterns of behavior, perception, and evaluation and should therefore influence the experience of AARC. The 4.5-year longitudinal study examines this association between personality traits and AARC in a sample of 423 individuals aged 40 to 98 years ( = 62.9 years) using latent change analyses. After controlling for sex, health, and education, a different pattern of associations for cross-sectional vs. longitudinal relations. Cross-sectionally, neuroticism was positively related to AARC losses, whereas openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism were positively related to AARC gains. Longitudinally, the impact of personality traits on change in AARC was rather limited with only higher conscientiousness acting as a predictor of decreases in AARC losses over time. Overall, the findings add to the existing literature on associations between personality traits and subjective aging. Specifically, the results indicate that personality traits are differentially related to awareness of age-related gains in comparison to awareness of age-related losses.

Sixty patients and their caregivers participated in this study. Patients completed activities of daily living tasks and several neuropsychological tests assessing memory, abstract reasoning, and language. Caregivers completed self-report measures assessing caregiver burden and psychological distress. Results revealed that the mAD caregivers endorsed greater physical burden and feelings of missing out on life compared to MCI caregivers. The mAD caregivers indicated greater depression and anxiety relative to MCI caregivers. Stepwise regression found that fewer patient neuropsychological scores predicted caregiver burden, as compared to patients' daily functioning. Overall, mAD displayed more severe types of burden and psychological distress relative to MCI caregivers and patients' daily functional abilities better predicated caregivers' burden and psychological distress than patients' neuropsychological functioning.

The articles in the present volume enhance the understanding of the role of perceived time in human development. Together, they point to the multifaceted nature of perceived future time and the associations different aspects of time have with goals, preferences, and well-being. Specifically, the articles showcase antecedents and consequences of perceived time left in life, consider ways to optimize measurement of future time horizons, and advance novel questions about the neural correlates of domain-specific aspects of subjective time. Findings are considered within the framework of socioemotional selectivity theory. Future directions for research on time horizons are discussed.

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a risk state for dementia. The present study assessed daily functioning in MCI individuals (amnestic [aMCI] and nonamnestic [naMCI]) relative to those with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy controls (NC). Twenty AD participants, 14 aMCI, 12 naMCI, and 30 healthy controls were administered the Direct Assessment of Functional Status (DAFS). The AD group performed poorer than all groups on all DAFS subscales. The aMCI group performed poorer than controls on the shopping subtests, while the naMCI group performed poorer than controls on only the free recall shopping. Finally, DAFS subscales discriminated the AD and aMCI groups well, but only recognition shopping discriminated between naMCI and aMCI individuals. These findings suggest that circumscribed ADL deficits distinguish subtypes of MCI and AD.

Attachment theory is useful for understanding how couples cope with stress across the lifespan. This study used the the Actor Partner Interdependence Model to examine the extent to which attachment related to one's own (actor effect) and one's partner's (partner effect) depressive symptoms and marital satisfaction among older, married couples with a musculoskeletal condition. Pain and support were also examined as mediators. A group of 77 couples completed self-report measures as part of a larger study in which support was manipulated. Results revealed that, when one or both partners were insecurely attached, both partners reported greater depressive symptoms and lower satisfaction; however, pain and support were not significant mediators. Findings have implications for targeted, dyadic interventions to improve psychological health of couples coping with pain.

The current study examined predictors of individual differences in the magnitude of practice-related improvements achieved by 87 older adults (mean 63.52 years) over 18-weeks of cognitive practice. Cognitive inconsistency in both baseline trial-to-trial reaction times and week-to-week accuracy scores was included as predictors of practice-related gains in two measures of processing speed. Conditional growth models revealed that both reaction time and accuracy level and rate-of-change in functioning were related to inconsistency, even after controlling for mean-level, but that increased inconsistency was negatively associated with accuracy versus positively associated with reaction time improvement. Cognitive inconsistency may signal dysregulation in the ability to control cognitive performance or may be indicative of adaptive attempts at functioning.

We considered the functional role of control beliefs for cognitive performance by focusing on patterns of stability across multiple trials increasing in level of difficulty. We assessed 56 adults aged 18-88 on working memory tasks. We examined stability vs. lability (intraindividual variability, IIV) in control beliefs and the relationships with anxiety, distraction, and performance. Age was positively associated with IIV in control and performance, and IIV increased with task difficulty. Those maintaining stable control beliefs had better performance, and showed less anxiety and distraction. Those with lower stability and less control showed steeper declines in performance and increases in distraction. The findings suggest that stability of control beliefs may serve a protective function in the context of cognitively challenging tasks.

Joint longitudinal-survival models are useful when repeated measures and event time data are available and possibly associated. The application of this joint model in aging research is relatively rare, albeit particularly useful, when there is the potential for nonrandom dropout. In this article we illustrate the method and discuss some issues that may arise when fitting joint models of this type. Using prose recall scores from the Swedish OCTO-Twin Longitudinal Study of Aging, we fitted a joint longitudinal-survival model to investigate the association between risk of mortality and individual differences in rates of change in memory. A model describing change in memory scores as following an accelerating decline trajectory and a Weibull survival model was identified as the best fitting. This model adjusted for random effects representing individual variation in initial memory performance and change in rate of decline as linking terms between the longitudinal and survival models. Memory performance and change in rate of memory decline were significant predictors of proximity to death. Joint longitudinal-survival models permit researchers to gain a better understanding of the association between change functions and risk of particular events, such as disease diagnosis or death. Careful consideration of computational issues may be required because of the complexities of joint modeling methodologies.

A large literature shows that caregivers of chronically ill older adults have a higher risk for impaired health and decreased longevity. In this paper we review research that addresses pathways through which family members experience negative health consequences from exposure to a partner's suffering. We first provide a conceptualization of suffering and describe how it can be measured, then review empirical evidence that exposure to suffering uniquely influences caregivers' health, and discuss individual differences in caregivers' emotional reactions to partners' suffering using three emotion theories (Gross' process model of emotion regulation, attachment theory, and a functionalist perspective on emotion). Finally, we discuss implications of the effects of suffering for the health and well-being of family caregivers.

We illustrate the use of the parallel latent growth curve model using data from OCTO-Twin. We found a significant intercept-intercept and slope-slope association between processing speed and visuospatial ability. Within-person correlations among the occasion-specific residuals were significant, suggesting that the occasion-specific fluctuations around individual's trajectories, after controlling for intraindividual change, are related between both outcomes. Random and fixed effects for visuospatial ability are reduced when we include structural parameters (directional growth curve model) providing information about changes in visuospatial abilities after controlling for processing speed. We recommend this model to researchers interested in the analysis of multivariate longitudinal change, as it permits decomposition and directly interpretable estimates of association among initial levels, rates of change, and occasion-specific variation.

Intensive measurement burst designs permit analysis of behavioral and biological processes as they unfold over short and long periods of time and providing the opportunity to identify change from an individual's normative level of functioning. The measurement burst design permits statistical decomposition of short-term variation and learning effects that overlay normative aging and provide stronger bases for detecting accelerated change due to pathological processes. We provide an overview of design features and analysis of measurement burst data in Project MIND. The objective of intensive measurement designs is to obtain greater resolution of processes of interest that permit reliable and sensitive assessments of functioning and change in functioning and of key determinants underlying short-term variation and long-term aging and health-related change.

Aging is associated with an increase in need for assistance. Preparation for future care (PFC) is related to improved coping ability as well as better mental and physical health outcomes among older adults. We examined the association of optimism with components of PFC among older adults. We also explored race differences in the relationship between optimism and PFC. In Study 1, multiple regression showed that optimism was positively related to concrete planning. In Study 2, optimism was related to gathering information. An exploratory analysis combining the samples yielded a race interaction: For Whites higher optimism, but for Blacks lower optimism was associated with more planning. High optimism may be a barrier to future planning in certain social and cultural contexts.