Relating Sensory, Cognitive, and Neural Factors to Older Persons' Perceptions about Happiness: An Exploratory Study.
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2018-01
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Abstract
Despite increased rates of disease, disability, and social losses with aging, seniors consistently report higher levels of subjective well-being (SWB), a construct closely related to happiness, than younger adults. In this exploratory study, we utilized an available dataset to investigate how aspects of health commonly deteriorating with age, including sensory (i.e., vision and hearing) and cognitive status, relate to variability in self-described contributors to happiness. Community-dwelling seniors (n = 114) responded to a single-item prompt: "name things that make people happy." 1731 responses were categorized into 13 domains of SWB via structured content analysis. Sensory health and cognition were assessed by Snellen visual acuity, pure-tone audiometry, and in-person administration of the Brief Test of Adult Cognition by Telephone (BTACT) battery. A subset of eligible participants (n = 57) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess resting state functional connectivity (FC) within a previously described dopaminergic network associated with reward processing. SWB response patterns were relatively stable across gender, sensory status, and cognitive performance with few exceptions. For example, hearing-impaired participants listed fewer determinants of SWB (13.59 vs. 17.16; p < 0.001) and were less likely to name things in the "special events" category. Participants with a higher proportion of responses in the "accomplishments" domain (e.g., winning, getting good grades) demonstrated increased FC between the ventral tegmental area and nucleus accumbens, regions implicated in reward and motivated behavior. While the framework for determinants of happiness among seniors was largely stable across the factors assessed here, our findings suggest that subtle changes in this construct may be linked to sensory loss. The possibility that perceptions about determinants of happiness might relate to differences in intrinsic connectivity within reward-related brain networks also warrants further investigation.
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Horne, Alexandra J, Kimberly S Chiew, Jie Zhuang, Linda K George, R Alison Adcock, Guy G Potter, Eleonora M Lad, Scott W Cousins, et al. (2018). Relating Sensory, Cognitive, and Neural Factors to Older Persons' Perceptions about Happiness: An Exploratory Study. Journal of aging research, 2018. p. 4930385. 10.1155/2018/4930385 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/18949.
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Scholars@Duke
Alexandra Jordan Horne
Dr. Alexandra Horne is an adult hospitalist at the Durham VA Medical Center and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Duke University School of Medicine. She serves as Site Director and Education Lead for the Internal Medicine Residency at the Durham VA, where she helps to oversee clinical training and support resident development.
Dr. Horne is deeply committed to medical education across the continuum of training. She is core faculty for the Duke Internal Medicine Residency Program and serves as Associate Course Director for Duke’s longitudinal Clinical Skills Course and Clinical Skills Intensive for second-year medical students. She also serves as an instructor in the Capstone course for graduating Duke medical students.
Dr. Horne earned her medical degree from Duke University School of Medicine and completed her Internal Medicine residency at the Johns Hopkins Osler Medical Training Program, where she served as Assistant Chief of Service (Chief Resident) for the Longcope Firm. Her academic interests are centered around medical education, with a particular focus on teaching clinical reasoning and simulation curriculum at a UME and GME level.
Linda K. George
My research falls into three broad areas: (1) social factors and the onset, course, and outcome of mental and physical illness, (2) social factors and aging, and (3) the organization and delivery of health services. I am working on funded research projects in all three areas. I have been the principal and co-principal investigator of two major epidemiologic studies. The first examines social factors and mental illness throughout adulthood. The second focuses on social factors related to both physical and mental health among older adults. I also am director of the one core of the Clinical Research Center for the study of depression in later life, funded by NIMH. The focus of my CRC project is the effects of social factors on the course of outcome of geriatric depression. In all of these studies, tje social factors examined include age, gender, race, urban vs rural residence, socioeconomic status, social stress, and social relationships. The major health services project in which I am involved is a randomized trial of outpatient commitment. This study is evaluating the extent to which outpatient commitment can increase the odds that the chronically mentally ill will be able to live in the community rather than being subjected to frequent involuntary commitments to state mental hospitals. The importance of this project is its potential to demonstrate that outpatient commitment is a less coercive and less expensive form of treatment for the chronically mentally that also improves their quality of life.
Rachel Alison Adcock
Dr. Adcock received her undergraduate degree in psychology from Emory University and her MD and PhD in Neurobiology from Yale University. She completed her psychiatry residency training at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute at UC-San Francisco and did neurosciences research as a postdoctoral fellow at UC-SF, the San Francisco VA Medical Center, and Stanford before joining the Duke faculty in 2007. Her work has been funded by NIDA, NIMH, NSF and Alfred P. Sloan and Klingenstein Fellowships in the Neurosciences, and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and honored by NARSAD awards, the 2012 National Academy of Sciences Seymour Benzer Lectureship, and the 2015 ABAI BF Skinner Lectureship. The overall goals of her research program are to understand how brain systems for motivation support learning and to use mechanistic understanding of how behavior changes biology to meet the challenge of developing new therapies appropriate for early interventions for mental illness.
Guy Glenn Potter
Heather Elizabeth Whitson
Dr. Whitson is a geriatrician, memory care specialist, and clinical researcher. Her career is focused on improving care options and resilience for people with multiple chronic conditions. In particular, she has interest and expertise related to how aging biology and comorbidities impact brain health and risk for Alzheimer's disease. She is co-director of the Duke/UNC Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (Duke/UNC ADRC), which aims to transform dementia care and research in Eastern North Carolina while developing novel preventions and treatment strategies for Alzheimer's disease by identifying aging-related factors across the lifespan that drive risk, progression, or experience of dementia. The Duke/UNC ADRC conducts the Memory and Aging Study, which is tracking brain and cognitive changes in over 400 individuals at risk for dementia in later life. Dr. Whitson also co-Chairs the Alzheimer's Association's Clinical Practice Guideline panel for the use of blood-based biomarkers in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. As a thought leader in a national collaborative focused on the biomedical aspects of resilience, Dr. Whitson seeks to better understand biological, psychological, and contextual factors that determine how well we "bounce back" after acute health stressors and why our resilience capacity changes with age. Dr. Whitson has contributed to work examining resilience to many types of health stressors, including surgery, dialysis, infection, vascular events, and vision loss - often focused on how these stressors affect the brain. She has led multiple studies to examine how the aging brain responds to the late-life stressor of vision loss, and she has developed a rehabilitation model to improve independence in older adults living with comorbid impairments in vision and cognition.
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