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 ...

Consistency and change in personality were analyzed by examining personality types across adulthood and old age using data from 2 nationally representative panel studies from Germany (N = 14,718; 16-82 years) and Australia (N = 8,315; 15-79 years). In both samples, the Big Five personality traits were measured twice across a period of 4 years. Latent profile analyses and latent profile transiti...

Increased age in adulthood is associated with systematically more negative cognitive change, but relatively little is known about the nature of change at different ages. The present study capitalized on the hierarchical structure of cognitive abilities to investigate possible age differences in the level at which change operates. Reductions in the longitudinal associations between test scores w...

Personality traits predict substance use in adolescence, but less is known about prospective substance use in middle age and beyond. Moreover, there is growing interest in how personality change and the multiplicative effects among personality traits relate to substance use. Participants included approximately 4,000 adults aged 25-74 who participated in two waves of the Midlife in the U.S. (MID...