Optimal aging is strongly related to personality factors along with health-behavior habits. Personality has played a key role in understanding the interactions between human behavior and the environment and as a vital predictor in determining health outcomes of individuals. Although previous studies have found links between personality traits and health,...
A consistent research question in caregiving is why caregivers show individual differences in their abilities to manage stress. This study focuses on the personality traits of spouse caregivers to assess individual differences which enable them to adapt to their particular caregiving situation. Previous research has established concurrent relationships between personality...
Previous research on WWII veterans in their 70’s and 80’s has shown that positive and negative appraisals of military service mediate between combat exposure and PTSD symptoms in late life. This thesis extends this research in two ways, first by determining how these variables relate to functional health in later...
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SoyoungChoun, Committee Member, representing Department of Human Development and
Family
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...
Purpose of the Study: We tested a life-span model of combat exposure on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in later life, examining the direct and indirect effects of prewar, warzone, and postwar factors.
Design and Methods: The sample included 947 male World War II and Korean War veterans from the...
We investigated whether hassles mediated the effect of life events on mortality in a sample of 1293 men (M[subscript age] = 65.58, SD = 7.01), participants in the VA Normative Aging Study. We utilized measures of stressful life events
(SLE) and hassles from 1989 to 2004, and men were followed...
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,...
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...
The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the effects of war stressors and psychosocial factors on negative and positive mental health outcomes among Korean Vietnam War veterans. The sample consisted of 367 male veterans who completed a self-reported survey conducted in 2017 (Mage = 72, SD = 2.66, range...
The veteran population, about 18.5 million Americans in 2016 (US Census Bureau, 2018), is particularly at risk for mental health problems. As an example, the suicide rate of veterans is about one and a half times higher than the general population (US Department of Veteran Affairs [DVA], 2018b). Another group...
