An estimated 5.7 million Americans are currently living with the dementia stage of Alzheimer’s disease, impeding health and wellbeing for individuals diagnosed, caregivers, families, and communities across the country (Alzheimer’s Association, 2018). Studying early indicators of age-related cognitive decline and pathological cognitive impairment (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease) is crucial to inform...
Age based self-stereotyping is associated with a variety of long-term physical health and psychological well-being outcomes for older people. However, little is known about how older individuals’ day-to-day experiences of functional limitations may be related to concurrent self-appraisals on dimensions representing negative age stereotypes. We examined how distal personality traits...
Adult development and social experiences are intertwined, which has implications for social policy, health, and well-being across the lifespan. This dissertation explores the benefit and risk that close social partners bring to adults' lives, and the efficacy and consequences of engaging social resources to maintain well-being in the face of...
The goal for this study was to examine within-person processes driving individual development related to social goals. We examined how social regulatory processes travel together over time to understand if daily social goal progress is sensitive to variation in experiences of support and hindrance, and the extent to which maintenance...
Personality traits and daily self-regulation of health goals, social goals, and perceived stress were examined over 100 days to better understand how traits may influence self-regulation. This study was conducted with a sample of 99 older adults via web-based surveys. Results showed that, as predicted, traits of neuroticism, conscientiousness, and...
This thesis focuses upon whether stressful aspects of an organism's environment are reflected by that organism's shape. It presents an application of the powerful thin-plate spline and relative warp methods from morphometric analysis to demonstrate the overall utility of morphometrics in detecting environmental stress in an estuarine flatfish, the English...
The social aspects of older adults lives are strongly linked to well-being outcomes. Social relationships in older adulthood are rewarding, but also complex, and to maintain a positive social environment, older adults must reconcile long relationships histories, negotiate changing roles, and deal with increasing dependencies. Older adults are known to...
Close social partners may contribute to or detract from older adults’ health and well-being, in part because daily emotions are closely coupled to the quality of daily social interactions. This study examines variation in this sensitivity to interactions with social partners across the contexts of emotional closeness, interactions with others,...
Low physical activity levels and high serum C-reactive protein (CRP) levels are risk factors for coronary artery disease (CAD) in both men and women. However, postmenopausal women who take hormone replacement therapy (HRT) may have increased risk of CAD because of HRT-related increases in serum CRP. There are two manuscripts...