Lifespan development is embedded in multiple social systems and social relationships. Lifespan developmental and relationship researchers study individual codevelopment in various dyadic social relationships, such as dyads of parents and children or romantic partners. Dyadic data refers to types of data for which observations from both members of a dyad are available. The analysis of dyadic data requires the use of appropriate data-analytic methods that account for such interdependencies. The standard actor-partner interdependence model, the dyadic growth curve model, and the dyadic dual change score model can be used to analyze data from dyads. These models allow examination of questions related to dyadic associations such as whether individual differences in an outcome can be predicted by one’s own (actor effects) and the other dyad member’s (partner effects) level in another variable, correlated change between dyad members, and cross-lagged dyadic associations, that is, whether one dyad member’s change can be predicted by the previous levels of the other dyad member. The choice of a specific model should be guided by theoretical and conceptual considerations as well as by features of the data, such as the type of dyad, the number and spacing of observations, or distributional properties of variables.
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Analysis of Dyadic Data in Lifespan Developmental Research
Gizem Hülür and Elisa Weber
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Biodiversity Metrics in Lifespan Developmental Methodology
Lizbeth Benson and Nilam Ram
In ecological sciences, biodiversity is the dispersion of organisms across species and is used to describe the complexity of systems where species interact with each other and the environment. Some argue that biodiversity is important to cultivate and maintain because higher levels are indicative of health and resilience of the ecosystem. Because each species performs functional roles, more diverse ecosystems have greater capability to respond, maintain function, resist damage, and recover quickly from perturbations or disruptions. In the behavioral sciences, diversity-type constructs and metrics are being defined and operationalized across a variety of functional domains (socioemotional, self, cognitive, activities and environment, stress, and biological). Emodiversity, for instance, is the dispersion of an individual’s emotion experiences across emotion types (e.g., happy, anger, sad). Although not always explicitly labeled as such, many core propositions in lifespan developmental theory—such as differentiation, dedifferentiation, and integration—imply intraindividual change in diversity and/or interindividual differences in diversity. For example, socioemotional theories of aging suggest that as individuals get older, they increasingly self-select into more positive valence and low arousal emotion inducing experiences, which might suggest that diversity in positive and low arousal emotion experiences increases with age. When conceptualizing and studying diversity, important considerations include that diversity (a) provides a holistic representation of human systems, (b) differs in direction, interpretation, and linkages to other constructs such as health (c) exists at multiple scales, (d) is context-specific, and (e) is flexible to many study designs and data types. Additionally, there are also a variety of methodological considerations in study of diversity-type constructs including nuances pertaining theory-driven or data-driven approaches to choosing a metric. The relevance of diversity to a broad range of phenomena and the utility of biodiversity metrics for quantifying dispersion across categories in multivariate and/or repeated measures data suggests further use of biodiversity conceptualizations and methods in studies of lifespan development.
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Blood Pressure as a Biomarker in Gerontological Research
Thomas M. Hess, Erica L. O'Brien, and Claire M. Growney
Blood pressure is a frequently used measure in studies of adult development and aging, serving as a biomarker for health, physiological reactivity, and task engagement. Importantly, it has helped elucidate the influence of cardiovascular health on behavioral aspects of the aging process, with research demonstrating the negative effect of chronic high blood pressure on various aspects of cognitive functioning in later life. An important implication of such research is that much of what is considered part and parcel of getting older may actually be reflective of changes in health as opposed to normative aging processes. Research has also demonstrated that situational spikes in blood pressure to emotional stressors (i.e., reactivity) also have implications for health in later life. Although research is still somewhat limited, individual differences in personal traits and living circumstances have been found to moderate the strength of reactive responses, providing promise for the identification of factors that might ameliorate the effects of age-related changes in physiology that lead to normative increases in reactivity. Finally, blood pressure has also been successfully used to assess engagement levels. In this context, recent work on aging has focused on the utility of blood pressure as a reliable indicator of both (a) the costs associated with cognitive engagement and (b) the extent to which variation in these costs might predict both between-individual and age-related normative variation in participation in cognitively demanding—but potentially beneficial—activities. This chapter elaborates on these three approaches and summarizes major research findings along with methodological and interpretational issues.
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Coaching Behavior and Effectiveness in Sport and Exercise Psychology
Ronald E. Smith and Frank L. Smoll
Coaches occupy a central role in sport, fulfilling instructional, organizational, strategic, and social relationship functions, and their relationships with athletes influence both skill development and psychosocial outcomes of sport participation. This review presents the major theoretical models and empirical results derived from coaching research, focusing on the measurement and correlates of coaching behaviors and on intervention programs designed to enhance coaching effectiveness.
A strong empirical literature on motor skill development has addressed the development of technical sport skills, guided in part by a model that divides the skill acquisition process into cognitive, associative, and autonomous phases, each requiring specific coaching knowledge and instructional techniques. Social-cognitive theory’s mediational model, the multidimensional model of sport leadership, achievement goal theory, and self-determination theory have been highly influential in research on the psychosocial aspects of the sport environment. These conceptual models have inspired basic research on the antecedents and consequences of defined coaching behaviors as well as applied research on coach training programs designed to enhance athletes’ sport outcomes. Of the few programs that have been systematically evaluated, outcomes such as enjoyment, liking for coach and teammates, team cohesion, self-esteem, performance anxiety, athletes’ motivational orientation, and sport attrition can be influenced in a salutary fashion by a brief intervention with specific empirically derived behavioral guidelines that focus on creating a mastery motivational climate and positive coach-athlete interactions. However, other existing programs have yet to demonstrate efficacy in controlled outcome research.
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Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Psychosis (CBTp)
Anthony P. Morrison and Lisa J. Wood
Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based psychological therapy that has been shown to have small to medium effects in improving outcomes for people experiencing psychosis. CBT’s theoretical model, drawing together cognitive and behavioral theories, outlines that it is the appraisal and response to an event which maintains distress rather than the event itself. CBT for psychosis (CBTp) specifically aims to modify appraisals and responses to psychotic experiences in order to reduce distress. CBTp has a substantial evidence base and is the most frequently offered psychological treatment for psychosis. There have been significant advancements in the field, with process-oriented therapies and digital interventions showing promise; however, more large-scale trials are required. Moreover, service users report positive experiences with CBTp and value the normalizing therapeutic relationship, improved personal understanding, and acquisition of new coping strategies. Improving dissemination and adapting CBTp so that it is appropriate for all populations is an ongoing priority for future research. Moreover, the evidence base requires more user-centered research to ensure CBTp is meeting the needs of service users.
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Culture and Personality Assessment
Fanny M. Cheung
Scientific personality assessment cannot be accurate without considering cultural factors. Cultural variations affect the linguistic, conceptual, and measurement equivalence of psychological assessment when these measures are translated and/or applied to different cultural groups, posing challenges to their reliability and validity. International psychologists have adopted various approaches to personality assessment during different stages in the development of cross-cultural psychology. The etic approach assumes that personality constructs are universal, and measures are directly applied in another culture. Although international guidelines have been developed to promote best practices in the translation and adaptation of these measures across cultures, the cultural relevance of etic measures remains a potential bias. The emic approach rejects the universality assumption and derives indigenous personality measures to suit the local context at the expense of cross-cultural comparisons. In response to the criticisms of these two approaches, the combined emic–etic approach has been demonstrated to be a useful method to develop personality assessment measures that are maximally relevant for different cultures. To enhance cultural sensitivity in science, practice and training in cross-cultural and multicultural assessment and mainstreaming culture in all aspects of assessment are called for.
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Daily Diary Designs in Lifespan Developmental Psychology
Shevaun D. Neupert and Jennifer A. Bellingtier
Daily diary designs allow researchers to examine processes that change together on a daily basis, often in a naturalistic setting. By studying within-person covariation between daily processes, one can more precisely establish the short-term effects and temporal ordering of concrete daily experiences. Additionally, the daily diary design reduces retrospective recall bias because participants are asked to recall events that occurred over the previous 24-hour period as opposed to a week or even a year. Therefore, a more accurate picture of individuals’ daily lives can be captured with this design. When conclusions are drawn between people about the relationship between the predictors and outcomes, the covariation that occurs within people through time is lost. In a within-person design, conclusions can be made about the simultaneous effects of within-person covariation as well as between-person differences. This is especially important when many interindividual differences (e.g., traits) may exist in within-person relationships (e.g., states).
Daily diary research can take many forms. Diary research can be conducted with printed paper questionnaires, divided into daily booklets where participants mail back each daily booklet at the end of the day or entire study period. Previous studies have called participants on the telephone to respond to interview questions each day for a series of consecutive days, allowing for quantitative as well as qualitative data collection. Online surveys that can be completed on a computer or mobile device allow the researcher to know the specific day and time that the survey was completed while minimizing direct involvement with the collection of each daily survey. There are many opportunities for lifespan developmental researchers to adopt daily diary designs across a variety of implementation platforms to address questions of important daily processes. The benefits and drawbacks of each method along with suggestions for future work are discussed, noting issues of particular importance for aging and lifespan development.
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Development of Visually Guided Action
Peter Vishton
Humans use visual information to select, plan, and control nearly all actions that they perform. Children are born with the ability to perform some actions, while others emerge only after several months. For instance, newborn infants can direct their eyes to attractive stimuli, but they are unable to smoothly follow these stimuli if they move. Many factors influence the action abilities of children and adults. As children mature, they become stronger and able to more precisely control their bodies. The interactions that the children have with their environment matter a great deal as well, such that the age at which children gain particular action abilities varies widely. Some developmental changes are highly action- and context-specific, but other changes broadly influence cognitive development. For instance, learning to walk enhances children’s language development. An understanding of visually guided action development is thus essential to any complete theory of human mental development. Characterizing the development of visually guided action abilities provides a better understanding of mental and physical development as well as enabling insights into how visually guided actions are learned and controlled in adults.
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Dyadic Designs in Lifespan Developmental Methodology
Jeremy B. Yorgason, Melanie S. Hill, and Mallory Millett
The study of development across the lifespan has traditionally focused on the individual. However, dyadic designs within lifespan developmental methodology allow researchers to better understand individuals in a larger context that includes various familial relationships (husbands and wives, parents and children, and caregivers and patients). Dyadic designs involve data that are not independent, and thus outcome measures from dyad members need to be modeled as correlated. Typically, non-independent outcomes are appropriately modeled using multilevel or structural equation modeling approaches. Many dyadic researchers use the actor-partner interdependence model as a basic analysis framework, while new and exciting approaches are coming forth in the literature. Dyadic designs can be extended and applied in various ways, including with intensive longitudinal data (e.g., daily diaries), grid sequence analysis, repeated measures actor/partner interdependence models, and vector field diagrams. As researchers continue to use and expand upon dyadic designs, new methods for addressing dyadic research questions will be developed.
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Evaluation of Psychological Interventions in Sport and Exercise Settings
Rebecca A. Zakrajsek and Jedediah E. Blanton
It is important for sport and exercise psychology (SEP) professionals to demonstrate that the interventions they employ make a difference. Assessing the degree of an intervention’s effectiveness depends first and foremost on the nature and scope of the intervention (i.e., the objective of the intervention) and its targeted group. Traditionally, interventions have been quite varied between the fields of sport psychology and exercise psychology; a common thread however, can be seen as an enhancement of the sport or exercise experience, along with an attempt to help the individual better self-regulate engagement with the targeted behavior or mindset. The central aim of enhancing the experience and increased self-regulation is oriented toward performance enhancement within sport psychology interventions, whereas within exercise psychology interventions the orientation is toward physical-activity adoption and better exercise program adherence. Although the two fields may have different objectives, it can be argued that sport psychology interventions—specifically psychological skills training (PST) interventions—can inform SEP professionals’ research and applied practices with both the sport and exercise populations.
Psychological skills training includes the strategies and techniques used to develop psychological skills, enhance sport performance, and facilitate a positive approach to competition. Since the early 1980s, a growing body of evidence has supported that the PST interventions SEP professionals employ do make a difference. In particular, evidence from research in sport contexts supports the use of a multimodal approach to PST interventions—combining different types of psychological strategies (e.g., goal-setting, self-talk, imagery, relaxation)—because a multimodal approach has demonstrated positive effects on both psychological skills and sport performance. The research investigating the effectiveness of PST interventions in enhancing performance has primarily centered on adult athletes who compete at competitive or elite levels. Elite athletes are certainly important consumers of SEP services; however, SEP professionals have rightfully challenged researchers and practitioners to target other consumers of SEP services who they argue are as deserving of PST as elite athletes. For example, young athletes and coaches are two populations that have traditionally been overlooked in the PST research. PST interventions targeting young athletes can help them to develop (at the start of their sporting careers) the type of psychological skills that facilitate a positive approach to competition and better abilities to self-regulate their emotional responses to stressful competitive situations. Coaches are also performers with unique needs who could benefit from PST interventions. Researchers have begun to target these two populations and the results might be considered the most intriguing aspects of the current PST literature. Future research related to PST interventions should target exercise populations. Exercise professionals often operate as coaches in healthy behavior change (e.g., strength and conditioning coaches, personal trainers, etc.) and as such should also employ, and monitor responses to, PST.
To facilitate further development and growth of PST intervention research in both sport and exercise settings, SEP professionals are encouraged to include a comprehensive evaluation of program effectiveness. In particular, four major areas to consider when evaluating PST programs are (a) the quality of the PST service delivery (e.g., the knowledge, delivery style, and characteristics of the SEP professional); (b) assessment of the sport psychological strategies participants used as a result of the PST program; (c) participants’ perceptions of the influence of the PST program on their psychological skills, performance, and enjoyment; and (d) measurement of participants psychological skills, performance, and enjoyment as a result of the PST program.
Article
Everyday Salivary Cortisol as a Biomarker Method in Lifespan Developmental Methodology
Christiane A. Hoppmann, Theresa Pauly, Victoria I. Michalowski, and Urs M. Nater
Everyday salivary cortisol is a popular biomarker that is uniquely suited to address key lifespan developmental questions. Specifically, it can be used to shed light on the time-varying situational characteristics that elicit acute stress responses as individuals navigate their everyday lives across the adult lifespan (intraindividual variability). It is also well suited to identify more stable personal characteristics that shape the way that individuals appraise and approach the stressors they encounter across different life phases (interindividual differences). And it is a useful tool to disentangle the mechanisms governing the complex interplay between situational and person-level processes involving multiple systems (gain-loss dynamics). Applications of this biomarker in areas of functioning that are core to lifespan developmental research include emotional experiences, social contextual factors, and cognition. Methodological considerations need to involve careful thought regarding sampling frames, potential confounding variables, and data screening procedures that are tailored to the research question at hand.
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Experience Sampling in Lifespan Developmental Methodology
Michaela Riediger and Antje Rauers
Experience-sampling methodology (ESM) captures everyday events and experiences during, or shortly after, their natural occurrence in people’s daily lives. It is typically implemented with mobile devices that participants carry with them as they pursue their everyday routines, and that signal participants multiple times a day throughout several days or weeks to report on their momentary experiences and situation. ESM provides insights into short-term within-person variations and daily-life contexts of experiences, which are essential aspects of human functioning and development. ESM also can ameliorate some of the challenges in lifespan-developmental methodology, in particular those imposed by age-comparative designs. Compared to retrospective or global self-reports, for example, ESM can reduce potential non-equivalence of measures caused by age differences in the susceptibility to retrospective memory biases. Furthermore, ESM maximizes ecological validity compared to studies conducted in artificial laboratory contexts, which is a key concern when different age groups may differentially respond to unfamiliar situations. Despite these strengths, ESM also bears significant challenges related to potential sample selectivity and selective sample attrition, participants’ compliance and diligence, measurement reactivity, and missing responses. In age-comparative research, these challenges may be aggravated if their prevalence varies depending on participants’ age. Applications of ESM in lifespan methodology therefore require carefully addressing each of these challenges when planning, conducting, and analyzing a study, and this article provides practical guidelines for doing so. When adequately applied, experience sampling is a powerful tool in lifespan-developmental methodology, particularly when implemented in long-term longitudinal and cross-sequential designs.
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General Coding and Analysis in Qualitative Research
Michael G. Pratt
Coding and analysis are central to qualitative research, moving the researcher from study design and data collection to discovery, theorizing, and writing up the findings in some form (e.g., a journal article, report, book chapter or book). Analysis is a systematic way of approaching data for the purpose of better understanding it. In qualitative research, such understanding often involves the process of translating raw data—such as interview transcripts, observation notes, or videos—into a more abstract understanding of that data, often in the form of theory. Analytical techniques common to qualitative approaches include writing memos, narratives, cases, timelines, and figures, based on one’s data. Coding often involves using short labels to capture key elements in the data. Codes can either emerge from the data, or they can be predetermined based on extant theorizing. The type of coding one engages in depends on whether one is being inductive, deductive or abductive. Although often confounded, coding is only a part of the broader analytical process.
In many qualitative approaches, coding and analysis occur concurrently with data collection, although the type and timing of specific coding and analysis practices vary by method (e.g., ethnography versus grounded theory). These coding and analytic techniques are used to facilitate the intuitive leaps, flashes of insight, and moments of doubt and discovery necessary for theorizing. When building new theory, care should be taken to ensure that one’s coding does not do undue “violence to experience”: rather, coding should reflect the lived experiences of those one has studied.
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Globalization and Intercultural Relations
Chi Yue Chiu, Anand Benegal, and Peter Hays Gries
Globalization refers to the growing economic, political, social, and cultural interdependence of countries ensued from cross-border trade, technology, investment flow, information and knowledge diffusion, and migration. It is an ongoing historical and multidimensional process characterized by increasing integration and interaction between people, companies, and governments of different nations worldwide. Globalization presents abundant opportunities for intercultural contacts, increases diversity of cultures within geopolitical entities, and has created cultural hybridities. The psychological study of globalization aims to investigate the psychosocial ramifications of globalization and intercultural relationships on the level of the individual. Several avenues of exploration have revealed insights into how individuals react to different culture-mixing phenomena, and how individuals hailing from different cultural backgrounds and holding different cultural ideologies respond differently or similarly to different situational cues and culture-mixed circumstances. First, globalization has sparked debates on the nature of and how people should respond to the characteristic cultural traits of a group: Should people be blind to the distinctiveness of these traits, treat these differences as the group’s defining essences, or view them as malleable qualities ensued from intercultural learning? These different perspectives have had important policy implications for intercultural relations. Second, lay people generally believe that although globalization fosters economic growth, it often leads to disintegration of traditional communities. Third, exposures to multiple cultures in the same space at the same time tend to accentuate perceived cultural differences and polarize positive or negative responses to foreign cultural inflow. Fourth, culture mixing experiences may evoke an exclusionary reactions (exclusionary responses) to foreign cultural inflow or heighten the motivation to learn from foreign cultures (integrative responses). Exclusionary responses are likely when (a) local cultural identities are salient, (b) foreign cultural influence is perceived to be intrusive, and (c) existential or epistemic anxiety is heightened. Integrative responses are likely when people (a) have strong learning motivation, (b) contemplate upon cultural complexity, and (c) are open to experience. New topics of psychological research of globalization that have emerged include (a) the ramifications of globalization for the conceptualization of cultural competence, (b) construction of multicultural identities, (c) consumer responses to international marketing, and (d) health and well-being in global contexts.
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A Historical Overview of Psychological Inquiry as a Contested Method
Karyna Pryiomka and Joshua W. Clegg
Like science in general, psychological research has never had a method. Rather, psychologists have deployed many methods under quite variable justifications. The history of these methods is thus a history of contestation. Psychology’s method debates are many and varied, but they mostly constellate around two interconnected concerns: psychology’s status as a science, and psychology’s proper subject matter. On the first question, the majority position has been an attempt to establish psychology as scientific, and thus committed to quantification and to objective, particularly experimental, methods. Challenging this position, many have argued that psychology cannot be a science, or at least not a natural one. Others have questioned the epistemic privilege of operationalization, quantification, experimentation, and even science itself. Connecting epistemic concerns with those of ethics and morality, some have pointed to the dehumanizing and oppressive consequences of objectification. In contrast to the debates over psychology’s status as a science, the question of its proper subject matter has produced no permanent majority position, but perennial methodological debates. Perhaps the oldest of these is the conflict over whether and how self, mind, or consciousness can be observed. This conflict produced famous disagreements like the imageless thought controversy and the behaviorist assault on “introspection.” Other recurrent debates include those over whether psychologists study wholes or aggregates, structures or functions, and states or dynamic systems.
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Historical Psychology
Noemi Pizarroso Lopez
Historical psychology claims that the mind has a history, that is, that our ways of thinking, reasoning, perceiving, feeling, and acting are not necessarily universal or invariable, but are instead subject to modifications over time and space. The theoretical and methodological foundations of this movement were laid in France by psychologist Ignace Meyerson in his book Les fonctions psychologiques et les œuvres, published in 1948. His program stressed the active, experimental, constructive nature of human behavior, spanning behavioral registers as diverse as the linguistic, the religious, the juridical, the scientific/technical, and the artistic. All these behaviors involve aspects of different mental functions that we can infer through a proper analysis of “works,” considered as consolidated testimonies of human activity. As humanity’s successive achievements, constructed over the length of all the paths of the human experience, they are the materials with which psychology has to deal.
Meyerson refused to propose an inventory of functions to study. As unstable and imperfect products of a complex and uncertain undertaking, they can be analyzed only by avoiding the counterproductive prejudice of metaphysical fixism. Meyerson spoke in these terms of both deep transformations of feelings, of the person, or of the will, and of the so-called “basic functions,” such as perception and the imaginative function, including memory, time, space, and object.
Before Meyerson the term “historical psychology” had already been used by historians like Henri Berr and Lucien Febvre, a founding member of the Annales school, who firmly envisioned a sort of collective psychology of times past. Meyerson and his disciples eventually vied with their fellow historians of the Annales school for the label of “historical psychology” and criticized their notions of mentality and outillage mental. The Annales historians gradually abandoned the label, although they continued to cultivate the idea that mental operations and emotions have a history through the new labels of a “history of mentalities” and, more recently at the turn of the century, a “history of emotions.” While Meyerson and a few other psychologists kept using the “historical psychology” label, however, mainstream psychology remained quite oblivious to this historical focus. The greatest efforts made today among psychologists to think of our mental architecture in terms of transformation over time and space are probably to be found in the work of Kurt Danziger and Roger Smith.
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History of Mindfulness and Psychology
Shauna Shapiro and Elli Weisbaum
Mindfulness practice and protocols—often referred to as mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs)—have become increasingly popular in every sector of society, including healthcare, education, business, and government. Due to this exponential growth, thoughtful reflection is needed to understand the implications of, and interactions between, the historical context of mindfulness (insights and traditions that have been cultivated over the past 25 centuries) and its recent history (the adaptation and applications within healthcare, therapeutic and modern culture, primarily since the 1980s).
Research has shown that MBIs have significant health benefits including decreased stress, insomnia, anxiety, and panic, along with enhancing personal well-being, perceptual sensitivity, processing speed, empathy, concentration, reaction time, motor skills, and cognitive performance including short- and long-term memory recall and academic performance. As with any adaptation, skillful decisions have to be made about what is included and excluded. Concerns and critiques have been raised by clinicians, researchers, and Buddhist scholars about the potential impact that the decontextualization of mindfulness from its original roots may have on the efficacy, content, focus, and delivery of MBIs. By honoring and reflecting on the insights, intentions, and work from both historical and contemporary perspectives of mindfulness, the field can support the continued development of effective, applicable, and accessible interventions and programs.
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Humanistic Theory in Sport, Performance, and Sports Coaching Psychology
Rebecca K. Dickinson, Tristan J. Coulter, and Clifford J. Mallett
As a basic psychological framework, humanistic theory emphasizes a strong interest in human welfare, values, and dignity. It involves the study and understanding of the unique whole person and how people can reach a heightened sense of self through the process of self-actualization. The focus within humanism to encourage and foster people to be “all they can be” and develop a true sense of self links to a strengths-based approach in sports coaching and the defining principles of positive psychology. In the field of sport and performance psychology, positive psychology has been influential as a discipline concerned with the optimal functioning and human flourishing of performers. Since the 2000s, many sport and performance psychologists have embraced positive psychology as a theoretical basis for examining consistent and superior human performance. However, in the modern history of psychological science, positive psychology is not a new phenomenon; rather, it stems from humanism—the traditional “third wave” in psychology (after the dominance of psychoanalytic and behaviorist approaches).
Sport is recognized as a potentially influential context through which people at all levels and backgrounds can thrive. The tendency to focus on performance outcomes, however—winning and losing—often overshadows the potential of sport to achieve this aspirational goal. As evidence of this view, many high-performing athletes are commenting on their distressing experiences to reach the top and the “culture of fear” they have been exposed to as they pursue their own and others’ (e.g., institutional) ambitions (e.g., medaling at the Olympic Games). Humanism concerns itself with the quality of a person’s life, which includes, but also extends beyond such objective and classifying achievements. It is a person-centered approach to understanding the individual and his or her psychological, emotional, and behavioral reality. It seeks to help people define this reality more clearly in such a way that will help them feel good and perform at a high level. Humanism has been, therefore, an important school of thought for improving the lives and experiences of people who play sport as well as those who perform in various other contexts.
Article
Inflammation As a Biomarker Method in Lifespan Developmental Methodology
Stephanie J. Wilson, Alex Woody, and Janice K. Kiecolt-Glaser
Inflammatory markers provide invaluable tools for studying health and disease across the lifespan. Inflammation is central to the immune system’s response to infection and wounding; it also can increase in response to psychosocial stress. In addition, depression and physical symptoms such as pain and poor sleep can promote inflammation and, because these factors fuel each other, all contribute synergistically to rising inflammation. With increasing age, persistent exposure to pathogens and stress can induce a chronic proinflammatory state, a process known as inflamm-aging.
Inflammation’s relevance spans the life course, from childhood to adulthood to death. Infection-related inflammation and stress in childhood, and even maternal stress during pregnancy, may presage heightened inflammation and poor health in adulthood. In turn, chronically heightened inflammation in adulthood can foreshadow frailty, functional decline, and the onset of inflammatory diseases in older age.
The most commonly measured inflammatory markers include C-reactive protein (CRP) and proinflammatory cytokines interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α). These biomarkers are typically measured in serum or plasma through blood draw, which capture current circulating levels of inflammation. Dried blood spots offer a newer, sometimes less expensive collection method but can capture only a limited subset of markers. Due to its notable confounds, salivary sampling cannot be recommended.
Inflammatory markers can be added to a wide range of lifespan developmental designs. Incorporating even a single inflammatory assessment to an existing longitudinal study can allow researchers to examine how developmental profiles and inflammatory status are linked, but repeated assessments must be used to draw conclusions about the associations’ temporal order and developmental changes. Although the various inflammatory indices can fluctuate from day to day, ecological momentary assessment and longitudinal burst studies have not yet incorporated daily inflammation measurement; this represents a promising avenue for future research.
In conclusion, mounting evidence suggests that inflammation affects health and disease across the lifespan and can help to capture how stress “gets under the skin.” Incorporating inflammatory biomarkers into developmental studies stands to enhance our understanding of both inflammation and lifespan development.
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International Perspectives on Residential Aged Care
Nasreen A. Sadeq and Victor Molinari
The need for facilities that provide residential aged care is expected to increase significantly in the near future as the global population ages at an unprecedented rate. Many older adults will need to be placed in a residential care setting, such as an assisted living facility (ALF) or nursing home, when their caregivers can no longer effectively manage serious medical or psychiatric conditions at home. Although the types of residential care settings worldwide vary considerably, long-term care residents (LTC) and staff benefit from environmental and cultural changes in LTC settings. Unlike traditional medical models of LTC, culture change advocates for a shift toward holistic, person-centered care that takes place in homelike environments and accounts for the psychosocial needs of residents. Carving out a role for family members and training professional caregivers to address behavioral problems and quality-of-life issues remain a challenge. In LTC settings, preliminary research indicates that implementing person-centered changes addressing resident and caregiver needs may lead to better health outcomes, as well as increased satisfaction among patients, families, and staff. With the burgeoning world population of older adults, it is incumbent that they be provided with optimal humane culturally sensitive care.
