Ernest Furchtgott

Concomitant eyeblink and heart rate classical conditioning in young, middle-aged, and elderly human subjects.

Pavlovian heart rate (HR) and eyeblink (EB) conditioning were assessed in 4 groups of Ss who differed in age: young = 19-33 years, young middle-aged = 35-48 years, old middle-aged = 50-63 years, and old = 66-78 years. A 100-ms corneal airpuff was the unconditioned stimulus and a 600-ms tone was the conditioned stimulus. A nonassociative control group received explicitly unpaired tone and airpuff presentations. All Ss were studied for 2 100-trial sessions separated by approximately 7 days. An impairment in acquisition of both the EB and HR responses occurred in the old and middle-age Ss, but all age groups showed significantly greater conditioning than did the control group. Slight increases in performance resulted from a 2nd session of training. These findings suggest an age-related impairment in a general associative process.

Performance but not acquisition of skill learning is severely impaired in the elderly

A battery of cognitive tests, specifically designed to assess verbal and skill learning, was administered to healthy volunteer subjects of different ages. Although there were age-related declines in initial and terminal performance in both a pursuit rotor and a mirror reading task, the increase in performance with practice on these tasks was little affected by age. Recall, but not recognition, of verbal material was also impaired in the elderly, as were some measures of frequency estimation. These findings are compatible with the contention that, although acquisition of declarative tasks, which requires conscious processing, is impaired in the elderly, acquisition of nondeclarative tasks, which can be learned without conscious awareness, is not affected by age. However, classical conditioning may be an exception to this generalization for reasons that are at the present time unknown.

Some determinants of attrition in prospective studies on aging

Demographic measures, psychosocial variables, and objective and subjective measures of physical impairment were assessed in elderly men twice at intervals of 12 to 18 months. Canonical discriminant function analysis of the relationship between these predictor variables on the first testing and whether participants (a) returned for retesting, (b) did not return because of apparent disinterest, or (c) did not return because of illness or death, revealed two significant canonical variates. The first, characterized by decreased mental and physical capacity, discriminated between the deceased/ill group and the other two groups. The second was characterized by decreased social interaction and life satisfaction, and increased life events, and distinguished between the disinterested group and the other two groups. However, both groups that failed to return for retesting showed evidence of impaired physical health and a general disengagement from social and personal activities, compared to the retested group.

Learning and Reaction Time Performance in Older Veterans: Relationship to Attitudes and Life Satisfaction.

Young (age 20–35) and old (age 55–70) veterans were tested on serial learning and reaction time tasks. Life satisfaction, attitudes toward older people, and physical and mental status were also assessed. Younger veterans showed better performance on both learning and psychomotor tasks than did older veterans. However, positive attitudes toward aging, and greater life satisfaction were associated with better performance on the behavioral tasks in the older group. Certain aspects of physical and mental status were also associated with better learning and reaction time scores in the elderly. These results suggest that age-related behavioral decrements may be related to psychosocial variables but that physio-medical factors may play a mediating role.

Ionizing Radiations and the Nervous System

The rapid increase in the applications of atomic energy—ranging from military hardware to power generation to medicine—and the potential dangers associated with this form of energy have focused the attention of both the scientific community as well as the public on an understanding of the biological effects of these radiations. The beneficial uses of atomic energy such as the development of nuclear power plants and the use of radiations in medical diagnosis and treatment have raised difficult questions of weighing the potential benefits against risks. Subcommittees of the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS)-National Research Council (NRC) (BEAR Committee) have published a series of reports between 1956 and 1961 dealing with different aspects of atomic radiation.(1) None of these reports, however, dealt specifically with the effects on the nervous system. More recently, in 1972, another committee of NAS-NRC published a reported entitled “The Effects on Populations of Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation.”(2) In that report some references are made to the nervous system. In 1955 the General Assembly of the United Nations established a permanent Committee on the Scientific Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR). The Committee consists of scientific representatives of 15 member nations, and it periodically reports on effects of human exposure to ionizing radiations. In 1969 the Committee published a report dealing specifically with the effects on the nervous system.(3)

Attitudes towards aging and physical health

Brief narrative descriptions of four hypothetical individuals who differed in age and physical health were developed and presented to people who differed in age and sex. Each participant read only one of the four profiles. After reading the profile, the participant rated the profiled individual on the Rosencrantz and McNevin (1969) semantic differential scale of attitudes towards aging. Respondents were divided into a young group (29 years or younger), a middle-aged group (30-49 years), and an old group (50 years and older). No participant gender effects were found. All three age groups rated the older and younger profiles of persons in poor health more negatively than those describing healthy persons on each of the three dimensions of the Rosencrantz-McNeven scale. Older respondents tended to view the younger healthy profile and to a lessor extent the younger-sick profile more positively than the older profiles, but the young and middle-aged respondents viewed the older profiles more positively than the younger profiles on all three dimensions of the scale. These findings suggest that (a) a major component of negative attitudes toward the aged may be related to the more likely occurrence of physical illness in this age group, and (b) more negative attitudes toward the aged are more likely to occur in older than younger respondents regardless of health status.

Sleep and Fatigue

In the previous chapter, we discussed some of the biological mechanisms that are related to motivation. Most definitions of motivation include an energetic factor. Sleep and/or fatigue imply low levels of overt activity. The desire for sleep may be considered to be a powerful motive, and a reduction of this activity leads to efforts to satisfy this need. Numerous disciplines from biochemistry to psychology have contributed to our understanding of this phenomenon. In 1995, The National Institute of Mental Health convened a task force on basic behavioral research needs. One section of the group’s report covered emotion and motivation, and the latter included a statement that “the need for sleep is powerfully motivating.”

Purpose or Meaning of Life

In the previous chapter, our discussion of the self was largely based on its mainstream quantitative treatment in academic psychology. A somewhat different approach to the self has come from philosophy, namely, existentialism, which actually represents several related systems.

Ecological Studies of Stress and Coping

In the chapters on stress and coping, we emphasized the importance of the context and the difficulties in generalizing from laboratory research or from one field study to another in which a different stressor was encountered. First, we already have noted some of the inherent methodological problems in field studies of stress and aging. We usually do not have data on the individual prior to the experience of the stressor. Second, for many life events, it is not possible to compare young and old persons, either because a stressful life event commonly occurs only during a certain stage of life (e.g., unemployment in the young and retirement in the old) or the event has a different meaning or consequence for persons of different ages, as do divorce or death of a spouse. Third, older people are more likely to experience chronic stressors that may by exacerbated by other, more recent acute stressors. For example, in addition to her own chronic health condition, a wife may be burdened by a newer need to be a caregiver to her husband. Elder, George, and Shanahan (1996) allude to the paucity of data on the impact of chronic stressors on more recent burdens. While there have been studies in which the effects of a life event for a young and old person were compared, invariably, conclusions were drawn from separate studies in which young individuals were observed in a different context from that applied to older persons.

Eating and Drinking

In animal studies of motivation, hunger and thirst have traditionally been the most thoroughly investigated motives. In the Handbook of the Psychology of Aging (1977), Elias and Elias begin their review of motivation with animal studies of hunger-induced drives. This biologically based motivation is not reviewed in their section on human motivation and the subsequent editions of the Handbook do not discuss this topic. The 1977 review is of limited value for understanding these motives on the human level.