The elderly are at risk for stress-related emotional and physical health problems in a number of facets of their lives, but research to date has offered only limited approaches to helping them adapt. Two major areas of psychological research are integrated into one approach in this project, and an experimental intervention is proposed to determine the ability of the approach to prevent demoralization. Concepts and techniques from the major life event literature are integrated with those from the literature on everyday events and employed within a longitudinal design. A personal mastery approach, developed by the investigators and tested in prior studies, is applied to the assessment of both the major and everyday events and the dependent variables; this is the first formal application of this conceptual approach to the elderly. Older adults at risk for demoralization due either to recent loss of spouse or lowered physical ability are studied along with matched controls. The study itself has two parts: (1) A longitudinal-prospective assessment of events and psychological well-being in which 240 older adults are interviewed each month for 10 months, and (2) an experimental intervention in which a representative subsample of 80 older adults are given instructions designed to encourage them to alter their responses to everyday events in a way that will provide them fewer undesirable transactions with their environment and more desirable ones. Both phases will be administered by elderly peers who are employed to act as interviewers. In the interviews information on the occurrence of both major and small events in the past month will be collected along with measures of coping, personal mastery and demoralization. Both desirable and undesirable events will be studied and distinct predictions are made about the effects of the occurrence of each on facets of well-being. The experimental procedures will induce respondents to activate responses to ongoing stresses in their lives to provide them with an enhanced sense of personal mastery over both desired events and undesired demands from their environment. Such effects are expected to reduce vulnerability to demoralization for all groups.
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