There is an urgent need to understand the processes by which economic hardship and family stressors in childhood reach across decades to erode midlife health. Research has been hampered by dependence on adults' retrospective reports about their childhood environments. Using a rare longitudinal database, the proposed study overcomes this problem by going back across decades to use eye-witness accounts of the childhoods of individuals who are now in midlife. This project will study the middle-aged children of the original participants in the Study of Adult Development (Vaillant, 2002) who started life at two ends of the social spectrum - inner city Boston boys and Harvard College sophomores - and were originally studied in 1939 to 1945. These men and their wives reported in detail on their family lives over the next 74 years. A second gap in understanding concerns the origin of middle-aged adults' negative attitudes about aging - attitudes which have been linked with morbidity and mortality in mid- and late life. This study will examine links between how one's own parents grow old and middle-aged children's attitudes about aging, health-maintenance, and health. It will also examine three maladaptive styles of emotion processing that are common among adults who grew up in dysfunctional families, are associated with negative health consequences, and may be important obstacles to healthy aging. This project is significant in that it will help clarify the relative utility of eye-witness and retrospective reports of childhoo economic and familial adversity in predicting midlife health (Aim 1), identify the contribution of parents' quality of aging to baby boomers' attitudes about aging and midlife health (Aim 2), and assess links between three specific maladaptive styles of emotion processing that are associated with childhood adversity and poorer health in midlife (Aim 3). The study will combine decades-old eye-witness accounts of baby boomers' childhood environments and parents' late-life self-care, morbidity and mortality with newly-collected data on baby boomers' emotion processing styles, attitudes about aging, and health-maintenance behaviors, along with assessments of these middle-aged adults' physical functioning and health. The approach is innovative in that (1) it uses rare prospectively-collected data from both parents and Study interviewers about childhood economic and familial adversity to understand midlife health, (2) by clarifying the contribution of parental models of aging to variation in baby boomers' approaches to aging and health, it has the potential to move the field of attitudes about aging beyond the current emphasis on cultural stereotypes, and (3) it focuses on highly specific difficulties with emotion processing that are the legacy of childhood adversity, that have been shown to be modifiable through targeted interventions, and that are associated with midlife health decline. The rationale for this research is that clarifying the specific processes that link family-of-origi experiences with midlife health is essential to designing more effective interventions to promote healthy aging.

Public Health Relevance

The proposed research is relevant to public health because it aims to clarify family-of- origin economic and socioemotional determinants of healthy aging and to identify factors that undermine midlife physical health and perpetuate the current epidemic of chronic preventable disease. In its focus on elucidating potentially modifiable obstacles to healthy aging, the project is relevant to the mission of the National Institute on Aging, which is o improve the health and well-being of older Americans through research.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Aging (NIA)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01AG045230-03
Application #
9038209
Study Section
Social Psychology, Personality and Interpersonal Processes Study Section (SPIP)
Program Officer
Nielsen, Lisbeth
Project Start
2014-07-15
Project End
2019-03-31
Budget Start
2016-04-01
Budget End
2017-03-31
Support Year
3
Fiscal Year
2016
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
Massachusetts General Hospital
Department
Type
DUNS #
073130411
City
Boston
State
MA
Country
United States
Zip Code
Waldinger, Robert; Schulz, Marc (2018) The Blind Psychological Scientists and the Elephant: Reply to Sherlock and Zietsch. Psychol Sci 29:158-160
Nevarez, Michael D; Morrill, Melinda I; Waldinger, Robert J (2018) Thriving in midlife: The roles of childhood nurturance and adult defense mechanisms. J Res Pers 74:35-41
Nevarez, Michael D; Yee, Hannah M; Waldinger, Robert J (2017) Friendship in War: Camaraderie and Prevention of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Prevention. J Trauma Stress 30:512-520
Nevarez, Michael D; Malone, Johanna C; Rentz, Dorene M et al. (2017) War and remembrance: Combat exposure in young adulthood and memory function sixty years later. Compr Psychiatry 72:97-105
Malone, Johanna C; Liu, Sabrina R; Vaillant, George E et al. (2016) Midlife Eriksonian psychosocial development: Setting the stage for late-life cognitive and emotional health. Dev Psychol 52:496-508
Waldinger, Robert J; Schulz, Marc S (2016) The Long Reach of Nurturing Family Environments: Links With Midlife Emotion-Regulatory Styles and Late-Life Security in Intimate Relationships. Psychol Sci 27:1443-1450
Morrill, Melinda Ippolito; Hawrilenko, Matt; Córdova, James V (2016) A longitudinal examination of positive parenting following an acceptance-based couple intervention. J Fam Psychol 30:104-113
Waldinger, Robert J; Cohen, Shiri; Schulz, Marc S et al. (2015) Security of attachment to spouses in late life: Concurrent and prospective links with cognitive and emotional wellbeing. Clin Psychol Sci 3:516-529
Landes, Scott D; Ardelt, Monika; Vaillant, George E et al. (2014) Childhood adversity, midlife generativity, and later life well-being. J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci 69:942-52
Vaillant, George E; Okereke, Olivia I; Mukamal, Kenneth et al. (2014) Antecedents of intact cognition and dementia at age 90 years: a prospective study. Int J Geriatr Psychiatry 29:1278-85

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