The goal of this work was to analyze the social representations that women of three different age groups had about aging, rejuvenating, and methods of rejuvenation. The research was performed in São Paulo between 2004 and 2005. The participants of this research were three groups of women of different ages: 19 to 24 years, 25 to 35 years, and over 60 years. The data were collected by the focus group technique. Data was analyzed using the lexical analysis software ALCESTE 4.5. The main results show a social representation of aging centered on losses and gains. The subjects appraised the possibility of using rejuvenating methods only when it was extremely necessary, because of the health risks that most of them involve. The three groups agreed about natural methods of rejuvenating instead of resorting to invasive methods.

The relationship between perceived loss of control and passivity in social activities in a non-handicapped institutionalized elderly population was assessed. Perceived loss of control was assessed from three different types of expectancies: low action-outcome expectancies, high situation-outcome expectancies, and low efficacy expectancies. Passivity scores were reported by the staff. The effect of these three types of expectancies on passivity was analyzed in terms of motivation and volition, which were treated as mediating variables. Overall analysis of the structural equations, as well as partial hierarchical regression analyses, showed that efficacy expectancies were good predictors of passivity, but this was not the case for the action-outcome and situation-outcome expectancies. These results lend more support to a volitional rather than to a motivational interpretation of the effect of control on passivity. The implications of these results for intervention and for a differentiated conception of expectancies are discussed.

The authors of the present article based their assumption on the concept that the sensory systems are the “windows to the brain” through which various functions of the human organism can be controlled. Comprehension of the fundamental mechanisms of the optimization of the sensory systems, brain, and cardiac functions has increased based on the prolonged sensory flows using conscious and unconscious aromatherapy and multimodal sensory activation. Sensory flow evoked stable systemic responses, including adaptive alteration of psycho-emotional state, attention, memory, sensorimotor reactions, inter-sensory interaction, visual information processing, statokinetic stability, and autonomic heart rhythm control. The efficacy and expediency of the use of sensory flow for non-medicinal correction of vital functions of the human organism at the initial stages of ageing was revealed.

Aging has been associated with several brain changes that often affect the cognitive functioning of adults, but changes in executive functions, particularly in the field of decision making, have not been fully investigated. The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a widely used tool to evaluate decision making, but little is known about the effect of age on its results. This study used the IGT and compared healthy young (n= 40) and elderly (n = 40) adults to evaluate their decision making processes. There were significant differences in the learning curve of the two age groups, but no difference in overall IGT performance. The results for the first IGT block were different from those of the rest of the task, and the group of elderly adults had a better performance in this block. Elderly adults also showed a preference for deck A, the one that resulted in greater losses. Findings confirmed the results of other studies, which reported that the IGT block score is the variable with the greatest sensitivity to age in this instrument.

This study is aimed at exploring daily and desired activity patterns in a sample of older people living in a rural context, as well as at examining the effect of some influential factors and their relationships with life satisfaction. Our sample was made of 216 retired people and was recruited from 12 villages from Catalonia and Valencia with populations of less than 1000 inhabitants. Data were gathered by means of an interview that included daily and ideal activities and life satisfaction (by applying the Life Satisfaction Index). Our results show that yesterday's pattern of activities is similar to an ideal pattern, although in the ideal day, our sample allocated more time to social activities and less time to passive activities such as watching TV or resting. In both cases, leisure activities and time spent working seem to play an important role in older people's life. Gender has a remarkable influence on patterns of activity, as women devoted more time to instrumental activities and less time to leisure. In general, differences between yesterday's and ideal activities were not related to life satisfaction.

In contrast to previous studies which addressed separately memory for source and referent, the present experiment analyzes the effects of aging on memory for both, source and referent. The experiment simulated a conversation between two people exchanging descriptors of themselves and the other speaker (e.g., “I am helpful,” “you are capable”). Participants (N = 60) were divided into two age groups: younger (M = 23.47 years old, SD = 2.37), older (M = 70.30 years old, SD = 3.73). Recall, recognition, and accuracy in identifying source (e.g., “who said helpful?”) and referent (e.g., “about whom was capable said?”) were analyzed. Younger and older adults recalled and recognized equally well information read by the experimenter about herself, but only young adults showed better memory for the descriptors they read about themselves. Older adults were impaired in source monitoring, but not in reference discrimination. Normal referent discrimination in older adults is attributed to the fact that the referent forms part of the content of the episode, whereas who spoke it is part of its context, and older adults tend to show greater deficits in context than in content memory. These results are explained within the source and reality monitoring framework.

Recognition performance does not usually change along the lifespan, but the response criterion usually does, and in general, it changes from being conservative during youth to being liberal, in old age. The focus of the present study is to analyze the changes that take place, both in discrimination and response criterion, as a result of aging in two recognition tasks: one with neutral images, and the other with faces showing positive and negative emotional expressions. Two groups of participants performed both tasks: young (N = 21; age range, 17-33 years), older (N = 21; age range, 65-91 years). The analyses of several discrimination parameters (d′ and probability of recognition) and the response criterion yielded significant age differences. Thus, results indicated that the ability to discriminate of older participants was better than that of younger participants when having to recognize neutral images, and faces with negative emotional expressions. The response criterion of younger participants was always conservative, whereas older participants only showed liberal criteria in front of faces with emotional expressions. In relation to the neutral images, the response criterion of older participants was optimum, because it led to more hits, without increasing the false alarms. The results are partially explained by the tasks differential difficulty, and are discussed within the frame of Simulation theory.

Interindividual variability in vocabulary, sentence comprehension and working memory is studied in older people with mild cognitive impairment, very low cognitive impairment and normal state, according to the Mini Examen Cognoscitivo (MEC). In the study participated 71 seniors, aged between 62 to 90 years of age, with low instructional level (from one to five years of regular education). Variability measures were calculated in a test of lexical knowledge, another of working memory, and also in one of sentence comprehension.

The results obtained using a polynomial regression analysis of the absolute residual scores on the MEC, showed that: (a) variability increases in a linear fashion as the MEC score decreases in the case of nouns, and sentences with one proposition that do not follow the canonical order of constituents in Spanish; (b) Performance on the simpler sentences (one proposition and canonical order) and in the most complex ones (two propositions and non-canonical order) variability showed a change in its trend from MEC scores that indicate cognitive deterioration; (c) In relation to performance on the verbs, variability’s change of trend is not linked to cognitive deterioration. We discuss the results in terms of the utility of these measures as potential indicators of cognitive impairment.

Este estudio aplicó espectrometría de resonancia magnética de protones en el tálamo de pacientes esquizofrénicos y sujetos sanos. No hubo diferencias en las proporciones de metabolitos (NAA/Cr, Co/Cr o ml/Cr) entre los dos grupos. Se advirtió una relación entre la proporción NAA/Cr y la edad en los pacientes, con una tendencia hacia esta correlación en los controles, lo que indica un efecto de la edad en el metabolismo del tálamo.