thinking, impaired judgment, other disturbances of higher cortical function, or personality change. The disturbance is severe enough to interfere significantly with work or usual social activities or relationships with others. The diagnosis of Dementia is not made if these symptoms occur. . .in Delirium. . . The DSM-IIIR definition of dementia has good to very good reliability (kappa’s ranging ...

IMPORTANCE The prevalence of cognitive impairment and dementia are projected to rise dramatically during the next 40 years, and strategies for maintaining cognitive function with age are critically needed. Physical or mental activity alone result in relatively small, domain-specific improvements in cognitive function in older adults; combined interventions may have more global effects. OBJECT...

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to describe our experience of a class, using a film that deals with the social issues of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and the results of surveys before and after the class. METHODS One hundred fifty-six second-year medical students were surveyed with self-questionnaires (9-point Likert scale) before, immediately after, and 2 years after a class that vi...

Comprehension of spoken language by older adults depends not only on effects of hearing acuity and age-related cognitive change but also on characteristics of the message, such as syntactic complexity and presentation rate. When younger and older adults with clinically normal hearing and with mild-to-moderate hearing loss were tested on comprehension of short spoken sentences that varied in syn...

A longitudinal study of employed individuals was used to test the relationship between social investment at work-the act of cognitively and emotionally committing to one's job-and longitudinal and cross-sectional personality trait development. Participants provided ratings of personality traits and social investment at work at two time-points, separated by approximately three years. Data were a...

Two patient-level mechanisms of change, defenses, and cognition were tested over 3 time points in 65 depressed adults, approximately half receiving treatment. Early changes in automatic thoughts and immature defenses were associated with symptom change from time-one to time-three. The directionality of early automatic thought change predicting symptom change was partially supported, but immatur...

Although theories of personality emphasize the integrative, enduring, and dynamic nature of personality, the current modal research design in personality ignores the dimension of time. We consider a variety of recent methods of longitudinal data analysis to examine both short-term and long-term development and change in personality, including mean-level analyses both across and within individua...

OBJECTIVES Racial disparities in late-life cognition persist even after accounting for educational attainment. We examined whether early-life educational quality and literacy in later life help explain these disparities. METHOD We used longitudinal data from the Washington Heights-Inwood Columbia Aging Project (WHICAP). Educational quality (percent white students; urban/rural school; combined...

BACKGROUND Cognitive function and telomere length both decline with age. A correlation between these two measures would suggest that they may be influenced by the same underlying age-related biological process. Several studies suggest telomere length may be positively correlated with cognitive performance but the evidence is equivocal. In this report, the relationships between telomere length a...

OBJECTIVES The present study examined the relationship between desegregated schooling and cognitive change in a sample of 420 community-dwelling African American elders (mean age = 68.6; SD = 9.1). METHOD Participants were recruited for the Baltimore Study of Black Aging - Patterns of Cognitive Aging. Cognitive measures from six domains of function were administered at baseline and follow-up ...