Tag Archives: aging

Alli Bosserman with resident Yvonne Smith

Alli Bosserman walks through Cayuga Ridge Nursing Home with resident Yvonne Smith.

As part of the Cornell Elderly Partnership (CEP), Alli Bosserman '11, a human development major and gerontology minor, visits Yvonne Smith at Cayuga Ridge Nursing Home near Trumansburg nearly every week and takes her on walks, reads to her and sometimes does her nails. But she's frustrated that she can't do more, such as alleviating her pain or moving her from her wheelchair to bed when she wants to rest.

Because of this, Bosserman wants to earn a master's in nursing and learn the best ways to ease the pain of people receiving long-term care.

"CEP has changed the way I look at life," she said. "It has taught me to look at aging as a healthy, normal and beautiful part of life. We are born with the need for nurture, care and support, and as we age and approach death we return to this state. It's a beautiful process." Read the full article

Here's news for retirees: Volunteering on environmental projects could not only prompt you to get more exercise but also improve mental and physical health through old age, according to a new Cornell study published online in The Gerontologist in February. Read more

Would  rewards or penalties work better for encouraging people to buy healthy food?  Will involving a person's family or faith-based social network improve an obesity intervention? How can state-of-the-art technologies be leveraged to measure people's exposure to stressors reliably and effectively, to help researchers study the links between stress exposure and health outcomes?

These are but a few of the questions that Elaine Wethington is tackling with her colleagues. She is playing a central role in three new prestigious grants which bring together accomplished interdisciplinary teams of scientists from economics, psychology, sociology, nutrition, marketing, epidemiology, and statistics. Wethington is a medical sociologist who is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Human Development and of Sociology. She is an expert in the study of stress and health and in translational research methods. Her major research interests are in the areas of stress and the protective mechanisms of social networks. She is co-director of the new Translational Research Institute on Pain in Later Life (funded by the National Institute on Aging and directed by Dr. Cary Reid of the Weill Division of Geriatrics), as well as the director of its Pilot Studies program.

A five-year, $6 million dollar grant will fund the Cornell Center for Behavioral Intervention Development to Prevent Obesity, a collaboration between Cornell University in Ithaca and the Weill Cornell Medical College. The goal of the new Center will be to translate basic behavioral and social science discoveries into effective behavioral interventions that reduce obesity and obesity related diseases in Black and Latino communities. The team will focus on behavior changes, not dieting - testing personalized strategies aimed at reducing weight and increasing physical activity in a way people can maintain over time.

In this project, Wethington will contribute her expertise to developing and designing the interventions, analyzing the results of participant interviews, and examining the impact of stressor exposure on the success of interventions. Dr. Mary Charlson, professor of integrative medicine at Weill leads the project. Other team members include Carol Devine, Division of Nutritional Sciences; Brian Wansink, Department of Applied Economics and Management; Martin Wells, Statistical Sciences; and Drs. Carla Boutin Foster, Erica Phillips-Cesar, Walid Michelen, and Bala Kanna from Weill Cornell. Harlem and South Bronx community health clinics affiliated with the Weill health system are participating as full partners in the development studies.

Another new study will team up researchers from the College of Human Ecology and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences to explore strategies for influencing eating behavior. The work is supported by a nearly $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The research team will study how how shoppers respond to having easy to understand nutritional information available and to food pricing. Answers to these questions will shed light on the potential effectiveness of pricing policies designed to curb America’s appetite for “junk food.” Brian Wansink, Professor of Applied Economics and Management, leads the project. Wethington will focus on analyzing findings, as well as on developing the sampling, recruitment, and retention efforts for the study.  Other team members include John Cawley, Policy Analysis and Management; Jeffery Sobal from the Division of Nutritional Sciences; and David Just, William Schulze and Harry Kaiser from the Department of Applied Economics and Management.

In an existing 4-year grant from the National Institute for Drug Abuse, Wethington is collaborating with researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University to develop valid, reliable, yet cost-effective instruments to measure chronic stress exposure in field studies. The instruments include hand-held devices for assessing chronic stress exposure and a web-based retrospective interview to assess stress exposure over a one-year period.  These instruments are being developed to support research on how stress affects health outcomes and how such effects are influenced by genetic factors. In this study, Wethington's contribution is focused on developing the web-based retrospective interview.  The team is led by Prof. Thomas Kamarck of the University of Pittsburgh Psychology department; team members include Drs. Barbara Anderson and Saul Shiffman at the University of Pittsburgh, and Drs. Daniel Sieworek and Asim Smailagic at Carnegie-Mellon.

These and other recent grants demonstrate the interest funders have in research that spans disciplines and translates basic behavioral and social science discoveries into effective behavioral interventions.

"The National Institute of Health recognizes that the 'team approach', involving established experts from multiple disciplines, has proven effective for tackling tough problems in health care and delivery, such as health disparities" states Wethington. "For some issues, such as reliable measurement of stressor exposure, social and psychological scientists are being encouraged to collaborate with computer scientists and engineers are developing health promotion and tracking devices. Social scientists who measure and study population health are being encouraged to collaborate with community health workers, health clinics, and frontline service agencies."

Effective collaboration strategies are the keys to success.Wethington adds: "No one discipline has the answer to every question. This is an exciting and rewarding time to be a health researcher.  You feel like you may be making a long-lasting contribution to the well-being of the population, while also benefiting from learning new things yourself."

Further Resources

Wethington, E., Breckman, R., Meador, R., Lachs, M. S., Carrington Reid, M., Sabir, M. & Pillemer, K. (2007).  The CITRA Pilot Studies Program:  Mentoring Translational Research.  The Gerontologist, 47, 845-50.

Wethington, E. & Pillemer, K.  (2007).  Translating Basic Research into Community Practice:  The Cornell Institute for Translational Research on Aging (CITRA). Forum on Public Policy Online, Winter 2007.

Karene Booker

Adapted from "Researchers Develop Simple Tools to Predict Cognitive Decline in Aging" by Lauren Gold, Cornell Chronicle, 1/26/10.

For most people, misplacing the car keys or forgetting a name is an occasional annoyance of normal aging. But sometimes forgetfulness can signal the beginning of deterioration in language, attention, reasoning, judgment or memory. With large numbers of aging baby boomers, the need for simple, accurate clinical tools that identify memory changes associated with cognitive impairment is increasingly important.

In a collaboration between Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and Cornell's Ithaca campus, Charles Brainerd and Valerie Reyna, professors of Human Development and of Psychology, have teamed up with Dr. Cary Reid, Weill Cornell geriatrician and investigator with CITRA, on a project that will improve tools for predicting and diagnosing  memory loss.

The Cornell Institute for Translational Research on Aging (CITRA), brings together community based organizations, social scientists, and medical researchers to address pressing problems in the field of aging. The contribution of CITRA's expertise and infrastructure was pivotal in securing national support.

Now, with a two-year grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act via the National Institutes of Health, the team is investigating whether a decline in a particular type of memory, called reconstructive memory, predicts cognitive impairment in the elderly. If the hypothesis bears out, it could lead to a breakthrough in our ability to detect cognitive decline years before the onset of major symptoms.

According to data from other studies, healthy elderly adults become mildly cognitively impaired at a rate of about 10 percent per year after age 70. Clinicians use a variety of neuropsychological tests to predict and diagnose the condition. However, the most reliable single test -- a basic verbal recall task in which a subject hears a sequence of words and then is asked to recall them – does not accurately predict future impairment.

That could be because people use three distinct strategies -- verbatim recall, reconstruction and familiarity judgment -- to retrieve information from memory. Earlier studies by Brainerd and Reyna have shown that verbatim recall, in which subjects mentally picture or hear the actual word, declines with age. To compensate, older adults use reconstruction, in which they remember something about the word (it was an animal, for example; or it started with the letter "p"), and then familiarity judgment, in which they sift through possible candidate words until they identify the right one. Since reconstructive memory relies on associations and experiences, which can be accessed through multiple pathways and networks in the brain, it is more robust and usually spared in healthy aging, Brainerd said.

But a decline in reconstructive memory could be an important and more accurate indicator of the extensive deterioration throughout the brain that causes cognitive impairment. To test the hypothesis, Brainerd and Reyna developed a mathematical model that analyzes data from verbal recall tests and estimates the amount a subject relies on each of the three memory processes.

In the first phase of the study, the researchers are using the model to analyze data from more than 800 previously tested adults -- some healthy and others already diagnosed with cognitive impairment -- and examining whether a decline in reconstructive memory is more closely linked with cognitive impairment among groups of people.

In the second phase, the researchers are testing and tracking 200 older adults over 18 months to see if performance in reconstructive memory predicts later emergence of impairment on an individual level. Recruitment and testing of study participants is now underway at sites in Ithaca and New York City and will gain momentum this summer as undergraduate and graduate students join the project. Dr. Reid is facilitating recruitment of study participants through the Irving Sherwood Wright Center on Aging in New York City and has been very helpful in advancing the project, said Reyna.

The findings could improve testing and treatment for impairment dramatically, Brainerd said. "Like any disease, the sooner you can identify it the better."

"The project is a model for integrating teaching and research and demonstrates the critical role of research-community infrastructure to facilitate and inform the research."

Human Development Outreach & Extension

Human Development Today e-News

Karene Booker

Would  rewards or penalties work better for encouraging people to buy healthy food?  Will involving a person's family or faith-based social network improve an obesity intervention? How can state-of-the-art technologies be leveraged to measure people's exposure to stressors reliably and effectively, to help researchers study the links between stress exposure and health outcomes?

These are but a few of the questions that Elaine Wethington is tackling with her colleagues. She is playing a central role in three new prestigious grants which bring together accomplished interdisciplinary teams of scientists from economics, psychology, sociology, nutrition, marketing, epidemiology, and statistics. Wethington is a medical sociologist who is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Human Development and of Sociology. She is an expert in the study of stress and health and in translational research methods. Her major research interests are in the areas of stress and the protective mechanisms of social networks. She is co-director of the new Translational Research Institute on Pain in Later Life (funded by the National Institute on Aging and directed by Dr. Cary Reid of the Weill Division of Geriatrics), as well as the director of its Pilot Studies program.

A five-year, $6 million dollar grant will fund the Cornell Center for Behavioral Intervention Development to Prevent Obesity, a collaboration between Cornell University in Ithaca and the Weill Cornell Medical College. The goal of the new Center will be to translate basic behavioral and social science discoveries into effective behavioral interventions that reduce obesity and obesity related diseases in Black and Latino communities. The team will focus on behavior changes, not dieting - testing personalized strategies aimed at reducing weight and increasing physical activity in a way people can maintain over time.

In this project, Wethington will contribute her expertise to developing and designing the interventions, analyzing the results of participant interviews, and examining the impact of stressor exposure on the success of interventions. Dr. Mary Charlson, professor of integrative medicine at Weill leads the project. Other team members include Carol Devine, Division of Nutritional Sciences; Brian Wansink, Department of Applied Economics and Management; Martin Wells, Statistical Sciences; and Drs. Carla Boutin Foster, Erica Phillips-Cesar, Walid Michelen, and Bala Kanna from Weill Cornell. Harlem and South Bronx community health clinics affiliated with the Weill health system are participating as full partners in the development studies.

Another new study will team up researchers from the College of Human Ecology and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences to explore strategies for influencing eating behavior. The work is supported by a nearly $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The research team will study how how shoppers respond to having easy to understand nutritional information available and to food pricing. Answers to these questions will shed light on the potential effectiveness of pricing policies designed to curb America’s appetite for “junk food.” Brian Wansink, Professor of Applied Economics and Management, leads the project. Wethington will focus on analyzing findings, as well as on developing the sampling, recruitment, and retention efforts for the study.  Other team members include John Cawley, Policy Analysis and Management; Jeffery Sobal from the Division of Nutritional Sciences; and David Just, William Schulze and Harry Kaiser from the Department of Applied Economics and Management.

In an existing 4-year grant from the National Institute for Drug Abuse, Wethington is collaborating with researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University to develop valid, reliable, yet cost-effective instruments to measure chronic stress exposure in field studies. The instruments include hand-held devices for assessing chronic stress exposure and a web-based retrospective interview to assess stress exposure over a one-year period.  These instruments are being developed to support research on how stress affects health outcomes and how such effects are influenced by genetic factors. In this study, Wethington's contribution is focused on developing the web-based retrospective interview.  The team is led by Prof. Thomas Kamarck of the University of Pittsburgh Psychology department; team members include Drs. Barbara Anderson and Saul Shiffman at the University of Pittsburgh, and Drs. Daniel Sieworek and Asim Smailagic at Carnegie-Mellon.

These and other recent grants demonstrate the interest funders have in research that spans disciplines and translates basic behavioral and social science discoveries into effective behavioral interventions.

"The National Institute of Health recognizes that the 'team approach', involving established experts from multiple disciplines, has proven effective for tackling tough problems in health care and delivery, such as health disparities" states Wethington. "For some issues, such as reliable measurement of stressor exposure, social and psychological scientists are being encouraged to collaborate with computer scientists and engineers are developing health promotion and tracking devices. Social scientists who measure and study population health are being encouraged to collaborate with community health workers, health clinics, and frontline service agencies."

Effective collaboration strategies are the keys to success.Wethington adds: "No one discipline has the answer to every question. This is an exciting and rewarding time to be a health researcher.  You feel like you may be making a long-lasting contribution to the well-being of the population, while also benefiting from learning new things yourself."

Further Resources

Wethington, E., Breckman, R., Meador, R., Lachs, M. S., Carrington Reid, M., Sabir, M. & Pillemer, K. (2007).  The CITRA Pilot Studies Program:  Mentoring Translational Research.  The Gerontologist, 47, 845-50.

Wethington, E. & Pillemer, K.  (2007).  Translating Basic Research into Community Practice:  The Cornell Institute for Translational Research on Aging (CITRA). Forum on Public Policy Online, Winter 2007.

Human Development Outreach & Extension

Human Development Today e-News

The Cornell Institute for Translational Research on Aging (CITRA) is pleased to announce continued funding of its Roybal Center. The new center will be called the Translational Research Institute on Pain in Later Life (TRIPLL), and will focus on improving the prevention and management of pain in later life. Cornell University and its medical college are joined by new partners including Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Hospital for Special Surgery and the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. Dr. Cary Reid will serve as Director and Dr. Karl Pillemer will serve as co-principal investigator. Dr Elaine Wethington, also co-principal investigator, will oversee the Pilot Study core component of the grant.

The focus on pain management in later life is particularly appropriate given that as many as 30 to 40 percent of older adults experience persistent pain, which can be a costly and frequently disabling disorder in later life. Effective solutions to the problem of later-life pain require moving basic behavioral and social science and medical research findings more rapidly into programs, practices, and policies targeting older adults. This Center will continue to take advantage of its research-ready senior center and agency network, based in the diverse multicultural environment of New York City. It will build on its earlier success in applying theoretical and empirical findings in the area of social integration and isolation, to understand barriers to diffusion of successful pain management programs, particularly self-management programs and strategies.

The mission of the center is to 1) translate the findings of basic behavioral and social science research into treatments, intervention programs, and policies that improve the health and well-being of older adults who suffer from or are at increased risk for pain, 2) promote translation of evidence-based practices, treatments, and interventions across
diverse venues to improve management of pain, 3) develop and test innovative methods, tools, and strategies that facilitate successful translation of evidence into practice and finally, 4) develop and maintain an effective infrastructure for conducting translational research on aging and pain.

For Further Information

Please email Karl Pillemer, kap6@cornell.edu, or Cary Reid, mcr2004@med.cornell.edu, if you have any questions or would like additional information about TRIPLL. A new website is in preparation and will be available shortly.

Human Development Outreach & Extension

Valerie Reyna and Charles Brainerd have received a two-year challenge grant from the National Institutes of Health to improve the prediction and diagnosis of cognitive impairment. Memory declines, especially in recall, are hallmarks of healthy aging and conversion to cognitive impairment. The project will use highly sensitive mathematical modeling techniques to improve the ability of clinical recall tests to predict future cognitive impairment and to diagnose current impairment. Their research will focus on one of the most widely used clinical tests of such declines, the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT).

The specific aims of the project are to apply mathematical models to RAVLT data in order to: (a) substantially improve the ability of the RAVLT and similar clinical recall tests to predict future impairment and to diagnose current impairment; (b) separate different clinically important components of memory from one another in accordance with current theories of the memory processes that underlie performance on the RAVLT and similar tests; (c) identify the components of memory that differentiate cognitive changes that are associated with normal aging from changes that are associated with conversion to impairment; and (d) provide separate scores for different memory components of RAVLT data, which can be used to better predict behavioral and biological markers of future impairment and to identify current impairment.

The research will consist of 2 phases, spanning 2 years. Both phases will rely on mathematical modeling tools and software that the investigators have previously developed. Preliminary studies have shown that RAVLT-type tests are inherently noisy measures of impairment because 3 different memory processes are responsible for performance, but only 1 of them (gist-based reconstruction) is responsible for conversion to impairment. The investigators will look at the effectiveness of modeling tools to remove this noise.

The first phase will establish whether noise-free scores improve the ability to separate groups of subjects that differ on biological markers of impairment, behavioral markers of impairment, and clinical diagnoses of impairment. This question will be investigated using a very large sample of subjects who participated in the Aging, Demographics, and Memory Study (ADAMS) portion of NIA’s Healthy Retirement Study. The second phase will establish whether noise-free scores improve the ability to differentiate individual people who differ in biological markers of impairment, behavioral markers of impairment, and clinical diagnoses of impairment. This question will be investigated in a longitudinal study of 200 adults (aged 70 and above) who will be administered a neuropsychological test battery as well as 3 versions of the RAVLT, spaced at 6-month intervals.

Human Development Today e-News

Rhoda Meador

When older people fall, experience chronic pain, or become socially isolated, a cascade of health problems tend to follow. Cornell University researchers have developed an innovative method, the research-to-practice consensus workshop, to bring researchers and practitioners together to share their knowledge and perspectives and to agree on research priorities, practice recommendations and how to disseminate recommendations.

The consensus workshop model was developed by researchers at the Cornell Institute for Translational Research on Aging (CITRA), which is a part of the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center at Cornell. CITRA is a unique collaboration of social science, clinical research, and education, encompassing researchers from Cornell's Ithaca campus; research clinicians at the Division of Geriatrics and Gerontology at the Weill Medical College of Cornell in Manhattan. The CITRA approach to research involves researchers, educators, and community participants in joint decisions regarding every step of the research process. CITRA is funded by the National Institute on Aging.

“We developed this model to get evidence-based practices into the field and to put researchers and practitioners on equal footing. This helps create research that has the practice community in mind, but is still scientifically rigorous,” said Karl Pillemer, co-director of the (CITRA) and professor of human development at Cornell, who helped develop the model. “Now, CITRA can take a pressing problem for older people and ask researchers and practitioners together how to best approach it.”

So far, CITRA has sponsored six consensus workshops: The first workshop focused on falls prevention; subsequent workshops have addressed social isolation, chronic pain, elder abuse, care transitions and the application of hospitality research to aging services. In the case of the falls prevention consensus workshop, “The group agreed, for example, that the interventions most likely to be effective are group activities that include discussion, self-help, exercise and interpersonal skills training activities,” said Pillemer. “They also recommended working to strengthen naturally occurring networks among older adults living in the same neighborhood.”

"The workshops begin with a cutting-edge, non-technical summary of the scientific literature on the problem. Based on this document, several dozen selected academicians and practitioners come together to work toward a consensus.  “The model provides a non-threatening environment for researcher-practitioner dialogue to take place,” said Elaine Wethington, professor of human development at Cornell. “We think that the model provides a learning opportunity for researchers to become more aware of the real-world problems practitioners face and for practitioners to become more aware of research. It also provides an environment where both groups can develop innovative ideas for intervention programs because researchers and practitioners possess valuable insights, which are often complementary.”

CITRA Research-to-Practice Consensus Workshop Model

The concept of a research-to-practice consensus workshop emerged, in the course of the CITRA partnership, from discussions of ways to bridge the gap between research and practice. The research-to-practice consensus workshop was designed to achieve several specific goals. First, it addressed the need for meaningful dialogue between researchers and practitioners. Opportunities for equal-status contact between researchers and practitioners in which serious research issues can be openly discussed are few (Minkler & Wallerstein, 2003). The consensus workshop model provides a venue for such dialogue.

Second, scientists’ agendas frequently do not reflect the real-world concerns of eventual end-users of research (Stokes, 1997). A primary goal of the consensus workshop model was to identify discrepancies between interventions recommended by research and the actual experience of community-based practitioners. CITRA researchers and community partners jointly assumed that practitioners would be able to shed light on why some programs do not achieve expected results, and could provide important contextual information useful for the design of future intervention research projects.

Third, Kitson, Harvey and McCormack (1998) suggest that effective movement of research evidence into practice requires researchers’ attention to the environment in which the research is to be placed and to the method of facilitating the knowledge transfer, rather than simply assuming that the rigor of the evidence is sufficient justification for adoption. By encouraging practitioners to critique existing research and to place it in actual contexts where older persons are served, the consensus workshop aims to capture practitioner interest and to encourage discussion about the implications for practice.

To achieve the goal of facilitating meaningful dialogue between researchers and practitioners, CITRA modified an existing model popular in the scientific community. Many government agencies and scientific organizations organize “consensus conferences” or workshops (Black, Murphy, Lamping, McKee, Sanderson, Askham & Marteau, 1999; Ferguson, 1993; Goven, 2003).

The major steps involved in conducting the consensus workshop are:  1) Selecting a topic that is both an important problem and one on which there is scientific evidence; 2) Selecting a group of scientific experts on the topic; 3) Preparing a preliminary report that summarizes available research findings; 4) Convening meetings of the scientific panel involving presentations and discussion of the report; and 5) Preparing a final consensus report.

Further Resources

Visit the CITRA website for complete reports from each of the consensus workshops. The website also features a downloadable manual that users can use to conduct their own consensus workshop.

The CITRA Research-Practice Consensus-Workshop Model: Exploring a New Method of Research Translation in Aging

Taking Community Action Against Pain: Translating Research on Chronic Pain among Older Adults

Elder Mistreatment Consensus Recommendations

Social Isolation: Strategies for Connecting and Engaging Older People

Applying Hospitality Research to the Delivery of Aging Services

Transitions of Care for Frail Elders

References

Black, N., Murphy, M., Lamping, D., McKee M., Sanderson, C., Askham, J., Marteau, T. (1999). Consensus development methods: a review of best practice in creating clinical guidelines. Journal of Health Services Research Policy, 4, 236-48.

Ferguson JH. (1993). NIH consensus conferences: dissemination and impact. Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, 180-98; discussion 198-9.

Goven, J. (2003). Deploying the consensus conference in New Zealand: democracy and de-problematization. Public Understand. Sci. 12, 423–440.

Kitson, A., Harvey, G., & McCormack, B. (1998). Enabling the implementation of evidence based practice: a conceptual framework. Quality in Health Care, 7, 149–158.

Minkler, M., Wallerstein, N.(2003). Community-Based Participatory Research for Health. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Sabir, M., Breckman, R., Meador, R., Wethington, E., Reid, M.C., & Pillemer, K. (2006). The CITRA Research-Practice Consensus-Workshop Model: Exploring a New Method of Research Translation in Aging. The Gerontologist, 46, 833-839.

Sabir, M., Wethington, E., Breckman, R., Meador, R., Reid, M.C., and Pillemer, K. (2009). A Community-Based Participatory Critique of Social Isolation Intervention Research for Community-Dwelling Older Adults. Journal of Applied Gerontology, 28, 218-234.

by Susan Lang and Andrew Reed

Many older adults experience decline in mental processes. But this need not be a handicap, because they largely can compensate by relying more on their strong emotional functioning, which doesn't decline with age.

According to Cornell psychologist Joseph Mikels, "One way older adults may be able to compensate for declines in memory and other important decision-making processes is through preserved emotional skills."

Mikels has been studying the role of emotion-cognition interactions in complex decision making, and how the quality of decisions can be improved across the adult life span. He has found that older adults:

do not experience age-related declines in emotional processing.
should trust their "gut feelings" when making decisions.
prefer not to have too much choice.
Mikels, an assistant professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology, says that research suggests that older adults may differ substantially from younger adults in how they make decisions. As director of the Emotion and Cognition Laboratory, he conducts studies to examine how emotion interfaces with such cognitive processes as working memory and selective attention.

Mikels and others have found, in fact, that relying on emotion, rather than intensive deliberation, can play an important role in decision making. To determine whether older adults might benefit from a reliance on abilities that are spared from age-related declines -- namely emotional processing -- Mikels' research team presented older and younger adults with hypothetical health-related decisions (choosing a physician, for example), in which one of the alternatives was objectively superior to the others.

"When older adults relied on memory-based decision strategies, the quality of their decisions was quite a bit lower than their younger counterparts," Mikels said. "In stark contrast, when older adults relied on their gut feelings, the quality of their decisions was just as high as that of the younger adults."

By focusing older adults' attention on their "gut feelings," Mikels was able to significantly enhance the quality of their decisions. Indeed, studies suggest that older adults may not only prefer to "go with their gut," but that their decisions may benefit immensely from doing so, Mikels said.

Mikels has also found that older adults prefer having less choice in decision making. In a series of large-scale surveys conducted with Cornell colleague Kosali Simon in Ithaca and New York City, hundreds of younger and older adults reported how many options they wished to choose from in a variety of domains, from prescription drug plans to ice cream flavors. Critically, older adults wanted, on average, half as many options as younger adults, and the older the participant, the fewer choices they desired.

In a separate study, Mikels and Simon measured self-reports of how much money older versus younger adults would be willing to pay for varying degrees of choice among prescription drug plans. Whereas younger adults were willing to pay increasingly more for additional options, older adults were not. In other words, Mikels' research suggests that excessive choice may be especially undesirable as we age, as it not only undermines the quality of decisions, but also people's motivation to choose anything at all. Individuals who are faced with dozens of options are less satisfied with their decisions than people who choose from relatively few options, even when the decisions appear as simple as selecting a variety of jam. And, evidence is now suggesting that this "choice overload" effect may be especially pronounced for older adults.

As such, Mikels said it would seem especially prudent to buffer older adults from these ill effects by tailoring decision environments more closely to their abilities and preferences.

Susan Lang is an editor at the Cornell Chronicle. Andrew Reed is a human development graduate student.


Karl Pillemer

Linda Wagenet

Updated 2/10/09

Karl Pillemer and Linda P. Wagenet are leading a program to better understand and support engagement of older persons in issues of environmental sustainability and conservation. The Cornell Program on Aging and the Environment (CPAE) is based on the idea that the older population can constitute a special resource for environmental action in the form of volunteerism and civic engagement.

Unique opportunities are provided by the intersection of three major social trends: the enormous growth in the older population; the need for opportunities for meaningful involvement on the part of older people (including the Baby Boom generation now reaching retirement); and the critical need for volunteers to play a role in remedying pressing environmental problems.

Pillemer and Wagenet have written a review and “call to action” on this topic, published in the Public Policy and Aging Report. They note that awareness has increased about the rapidly growing older population, which is expected to double worldwide between 2000 and 2025. Environmental organizations, however, have not shown significant interest in maximizing the involvement of older adults, nor have many aging-related associations been involved in promoting environmental volunteerism. Pillemer and Wagenet argue in their article that environmental volunteering may have particular value for older persons beyond the types of volunteer activity more conventionally performed in later life. They conclude that research, practice, and policy should work in concert to facilitate volunteering and civic engagement in environmental issues in the second half of life.

To put some of these ideas into practice, a pilot project was launched in September, 2008 called the Retiree Environmental Stewards Project (RESP). The RESP provided an opportunity for older adults to learn about environmental issues, develop leadership characteristics, participate in a class project and give back to the community. An evaluation research component accompanied the training, which was open to anyone age 60 and above. The Fall 2008 RESP cohort had seventeen participants, and the class has chosen to develop an educational campaign about the proper disposal of unused medications.

Topics addressed in the fall workshops included: human behavior and environment; air pollution and climate change; water and watersheds; conflict and communication; waste and recycling; local environmental policy; storm water management; energy/transportation/alternative energy strategies; land use/agriculture/planning. There was a mix of classroom lectures and field trips. For each session, Dr. Rhoda Meador, Assistant Director of the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center at Cornell, presented activities to increase the leadership skills of the participants. The RESP will be implemented in the Southern Tier and Capital regions this spring.

On February 3, 2009, CPAE sponsored a day-long symposium on aging and the environment. Featured speakers included Ms Kathy Sykes, the Director of the Aging Initiative for the US Environmental Protection Agency, Dr. Lenard Kaye from the University of Maine, and Dr. Nancy Wells from the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis at Cornell.

For Further Information

Contact Linda P. Wagenet, 254-7460, lpw2@cornell.edu.

Pillemer, K. & Wagenet, L.P. (2008). Taking Action: Environmental Volunteerism and Civic Engagement by Older People. Public Policy & Aging Report, 18(2)1, 23-27.

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