College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item THE WORST OF TIMES? AGING WITH LIMITED FAMILY TIES IN THE UNITED STATES(2024) Liu, Jingwen; Caudillo, Mónica L.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The drastic demographic and family transitions since the 1970s have raised ongoing discussions about whether older adults fare well socially and psychologically when they are increasingly likely to age alone in the U.S. Based on the social convoy model, the three studies of this dissertation answer this question by extending the focus from the proximal kinship ties to nonkin networks and broader social participation. Particular attention is paid to gender and racial/ethnic differences as demographic and family transitions are experienced unevenly by different social groups. The first study examines how family instability and the deviation from “normative” family trajectories are associated with older adults’ mental health. It found different levels of importance of the structure and instability of family for men and women of different racial/ethnic groups. Moving beyond family and households, the second study explores the substitution effect of extended family, friends, and neighborhoods in the absence of proximal relations. It reveals the “double plight” of Black and Hispanic older adults who may suffer from both a disproportionate exposure to the declining marriage and a lack of supportive distant relations serving as buffer zones in the absence of core kinship ties. The third study disentangles the population-level age and cohort trends of social connectedness, a more comprehensive indicator of individuals’ social wellbeing. It finds distinct intercohort changes in both the overall level of social connectedness and intracohort gender and racial/ethnic disparities. These trends can be partially explained by cohort differences in socioeconomic resources and health. However, societal changes that emphasize the significance of intergenerational solidarity, friendship ties, digital communication, non-religious social participation, and volunteering may play a more significant role. Taken together, this dissertation depicts a mixed picture of different populations who demonstrate varying levels of vulnerability and resilience against the quickly developing society. Therefore, it calls for both the enhancement of social welfare regimes and more positive narratives about unique resilience and strengths for women, racial/ethnic minorities, and socioeconomically disadvantaged older adults.Item INFLUENCE OF SUPPORTIVE CONTEXT AND STIMULUS VARIABILITY ON RAPID ADAPTATION TO NON-NATIVE SPEECH(2021) Bieber, Rebecca; Gordon-Salant, Sandra; Anderson, Samira; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Older listeners, particularly those with age-related hearing loss, report a high level of difficulty in perception of non-native speech when queried in clinical settings. In an increasingly global society, addressing these challenges is an important component of providing auditory care and rehabilitation to this population. Prior literature shows that younger listeners can quickly adapt to both unfamiliar and challenging auditory stimuli, improving their perception over a short period of exposure. Prior work has suggested that a protocol including higher variability of the speech materials may be most beneficial for learning; variability within the stimuli may serve to provide listeners with a larger range of acoustic information to map onto higher level lexical representations. However, there is also evidence that increased acoustic variability is not beneficial for all listeners. Listeners also benefit from the presence of semantic context during speech recognition tasks. It is less clear, however, whether older listeners derive more benefit than younger listeners from supportive context; some studies find increased benefit for older listeners, while others find that the context benefit is similar in magnitude across age groups.This project comprises a series of experiments utilizing behavioral and electrophysiologic measures designed to examine the contributions of acoustic variability and semantic context in relation to speech recognition during the course of rapid adaptation to non-native English speech. Experiment 1 examined the effects of increasing stimulus variability on behavioral measures of rapid adaptation. The results of the study indicated that stimulus variability impacted overall levels of recognition, but did not affect rate of adaptation. This was confirmed in Experiment 2, which also showed that degree of semantic context influenced rate of adaptation, but not overall performance levels. In Experiment 3, younger and older normal-hearing adults showed similar rates of adaptation to a non-native talker regardless of context level, though talker accent and context level interacted to the detriment of older listeners’ speech recognition. When cortical responses were examined, younger and older normal-hearing listeners showed similar predictive processing effects for both native and non-native speech.Item Effects of Age, Hearing Loss and Cognition on Discourse Comprehension and Speech Intelligibility Performance(2020) Schurman, Jaclyn; Gordon-Salant, Sandra; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Discourse comprehension requires listeners to interpret the meaning of an incoming message, integrate the message into memory and use the information to respond appropriately. Discourse comprehension is a skill required to effectively communicate with others in real time. The overall goal of this research is to determine the relative impact of multiple environmental and individual factors on discourse comprehension performance for younger and older adults with and without hearing loss using a clinically feasible testing approach. Study 1 focused on the impact of rapid speech on discourse comprehension performance for younger and older adults with and without hearing loss. Study 2 focused on the impact of background noise and masker type on discourse comprehension performance for younger and older adults with and without hearing loss. The influences of cognitive function and speech intelligibility were also of interest. The impact of these factors was measured using a self-selection paradigm in both studies. Listeners were required to self-select a time-compression ratio or signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) where they could understand and effectively answer questions about the discourse comprehension passages. Results showed that comprehension accuracy performance was held relatively constant across groups and conditions, but the time-compression ratios and SNRs varied significantly. Results in both studies demonstrated significant effects of age and hearing loss on the self-selection of listening rate and SNR. This result suggests that older adults are at a disadvantage for rapid speech and in the presence of background noise during a discourse comprehension task compared to younger adults. Older adults with hearing loss showed an additional disadvantage compared to older normal-hearing listeners for both difficult discourse comprehension tasks. Cognitive function, specifically processing speed and working memory, was shown to predict self-selected time-compression ratio and SNR. Understanding the effects of age, hearing loss and cognitive decline on discourse comprehension performance may eventually help mitigate these effects in real world listening situations.Item Effects of talker familiarity on speech understanding and cognitive effort in complex environments.(2020) Cohen, Julie; Gordon-Salant, Sandra; Brungart, Douglas S.; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The long-term goal of this project is to understand the cognitive mechanisms responsible for familiar voice (FV) benefit in real-world environments, and to develop means to exploit the FV benefit to increase saliency of attended speech for older adults with hearing loss. Older adults and those with hearing loss have greater difficulty in noisy environments than younger adults, due in part to a reduction in available cognitive resources. When older listeners are in a challenging environment, their reduced cognitive resources (i.e., working memory and inhibitory control) can result in increased listening effort to maintain speech understanding performance. Both younger and older listeners were tested in this study to determine if the familiar voice benefit varies with listener age under various listening conditions. Study 1 examined whether a FV improves speech understanding and working memory during a dynamic speech understanding task in a real-world setting for couples of younger and older adults. Results showed that both younger and older adults exhibited a talker familiarity benefit to speech understanding performance, but performance on a test of working memory capacity did not vary as a function of talker familiarity. Study 2 examined if a FV improves speech understanding in a simulated cocktail-party environment in a lab setting by presenting multi-talker stimuli that were either monotic or dichotic. Both YNH and ONH groups exhibited a familiarity benefit in monotic and dichotic listening conditions. However, results also showed that talker familiarity benefit in the monotic conditions varied as a function of talker identification accuracy. When the talker identification was correct, speech understanding was similar when listening to a familiar masker or when both voices were unfamiliar. However, when talker identification was incorrect, listening to a familiar masker resulted in a decline in speech understanding. Study 3 examined if a FV improves performance on a measure of auditory working memory. ONH listeners with higher working memory capacity exhibited a benefit in performance when listening to a familiar vs. unfamiliar target voice. Additionally, performance on the 1-back test varied as a function of working memory capacity and inhibitory control. Taken together, talker familiarity is a beneficial cue that both younger and older adults can utilize when listening in complex environments, such as a restaurant or a crowded gathering. Listening to a familiar voice can improve speech understanding in noise, particularly when the noise is composed of speech. However, this benefit did not impact performance on a high memory load task. Understanding the role that familiar voices may have on the allocation of cognitive resources could result in improved aural rehabilitation strategies and may ultimately facilitate improvements in partner communication in complex real-world environments.Item DO POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EMOTIONS PREDICT OLDER ADULT WELL-BEING? PROSPECTIVE RELATIONSHIPS WITH CARDIOVASCULAR HEALTH, SOCIAL FUNCTIONING AND PSYCHOLOGICAL SKILLS IN A NATIONALLY REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLE(2018) Hunt, Carly Ann; Hoffman, Mary Ann; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death in older American adults. To improve both individual and population cardiovascular health (CVH), the American Heart Association (2016) has emphasized the concept of ideal cardiovascular health, which involves achieving ideal levels on several health factors (e.g., blood pressure) and health behaviors (e.g., exercise engagement). Using nationally representative data from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) survey, the present study explored whether positive affect (PA) relates to ideal CVH in 1266 adults followed over a 20-year period, above and beyond the effects of negative affect (NA). At present, the relative contributions of PA and NA on CVH remain unclear. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotion posits that PA supports health by 1) broadening one’s repertoire of adaptive behaviors and 2) building personal resources, which could be psychological, physical, or social. From this perspective, CVH was explored as a physical resource that may build in conjunction with and following. Analyses also explored the extent to which PA predicts a broadening of behaviors relevant to CVH and healthy aging (i.e., volunteerism) and a building of psychological resources tied with CVH and healthy aging (i.e., positive reappraisal, or the tendency to locate positive meaning during times of loss and difficulty). Linear growth models were used to examine initial levels and change trajectories in outcomes, and post-hoc analyses were conducted using multiple linear regression modeling. Collectively, results suggest that PA is irrelevant for CVH and provide support for the well-established detrimental effects of NA on CVH. PA did not associate with volunteerism, and NA predicted lower volunteer engagement on average at the 20-year follow-up. PA, and not NA, supported positive reappraisal use. Results also provide evidence of the well-documented detrimental effects of socioeconomic and racial disadvantage on CVH. Implications for further research are discussed.Item Age Effects on Perceptual Organization of Speech in Realistic Environments(2017) Bologna, William Joseph; Dubno, Judy R; Gordon-Salant, Sandra; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Communication often occurs in environments where background sounds fluctuate and mask portions of the intended message. Listeners use envelope and periodicity cues to group together audible glimpses of speech and fill in missing information. When the background contains other talkers, listeners also use focused attention to select the appropriate target talker and ignore competing talkers. Whereas older adults are known to experience significantly more difficulty with these challenging tasks than younger adults, the sources of these difficulties remain unclear. In this project, three related experiments explored the effects of aging on several aspects of speech understanding in realistic listening environments. Experiments 1 and 2 determined the extent to which aging affects the benefit of envelope and periodicity cues for recognition of short glimpses of speech, phonemic restoration of missing speech segments, and/or segregation of glimpses with a competing talker. Experiment 3 investigated effects of age on the ability to focus attention on an expected voice in a two-talker environment. Twenty younger adults and 20 older adults with normal hearing participated in all three experiments and also completed a battery of cognitive measures to examine contributions from specific cognitive abilities to speech recognition. Keyword recognition and cognitive data were analyzed with an item-level logistic regression based on a generalized linear mixed model. Results indicated that older adults were poorer than younger adults at glimpsing short segments of speech but were able use envelope and periodicity cues to facilitate phonemic restoration and speech segregation. Whereas older adults performed poorer than younger adults overall, these groups did not differ in their ability to focus attention on an expected voice. Across all three experiments, older adults were poorer than younger adults at recognizing speech from a female talker both in quiet and with a competing talker. Results of cognitive tasks indicated that faster processing speed and better visual-linguistic closure were predictive of better speech understanding. Taken together these results suggest that age-related declines in speech recognition may be partially explained by difficulty grouping short glimpses of speech into a coherent message, which may be particularly difficult for older adults when the talker is female.Item INTERGENERATIONAL SUPPORT AND WELL-BEING OF OLDER ADULTS IN CHANGING FAMILY CONTEXTS(2016) Bao, Luoman; Chen, Feinian; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation consists of three papers that examine the complexities in upward intergenerational support and adult children’s influence on older adults’ health in changing family contexts of America and China. The prevalence of “gray divorce/repartnering ” in later life after age 55 is on the rise in the United States, yet little is known about its effect on intergenerational support. The first paper uses the life course perspective to examine whether gray divorce and repartnering affect support from biological and stepchildren differently than early divorce and repartnering, and how patterns differ by parents’ gender. Massive internal migration in China has led to increased geographic distance between adult children and aging parents, which may have consequences for old age support received by parents. This topic has yet to be thoroughly explored in China, as most studies of intergenerational support to older parents have focused on the role of coresident children or have not considered the interdependence of multiple parent-child dyads in the family. The second paper adopts the within-family differences approach to assess the influence of non-coresident children’s relative living proximity to parents compared to that of their siblings on their provision of support to parents in rural and urban Chinese families. The study also examines how patterns of the impact are moderated by parents’ living arrangement, non-coresident children’s gender, and parents’ provision of support to children. Taking a multigenerational network perspective, the third paper questions if and how adult children’s socioeconomic status (SES) influences older parents’ health in China. It further examines whether health benefits brought by adult children’s socioeconomic attainment are larger for older adults with lower SES and whether one of the mechanisms through which adult children’s SES affects older parents’ health is by changing their health behaviors. These questions are highly relevant in contemporary China, where adult children have experienced substantial gains in SES and play a central role in old age support for parents. In sum, these three papers take the life course, the within-family differences, and the multigenerational network perspective to address the complexities in intergenerational support and older adults’ health in diverse family contexts.Item The Changing Nature of the Retirement Transition for Dual Earning Couples(2015) Jackson, Jonathan; Kahn, Joan R; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation examines how dual-earning couples navigate the retirement transition differently now that women's and men's work lives have become more similar. As the retirement transition has become more complex, understanding how and when people retire requires researchers and policymakers to be attuned to the family lives in which individuals are embedded. The decision to retire is an individual choice but one's family circumstances, particularly one's spouse, can influence the process. Couples must often factor in spouses' age, health, pension assets, and health insurance coverage, especially since the work lives of many women have become much more similar to men. Whereas men's retirement decisions were seen to depend on their employment situation and women's' on their husband's, women's rising attachment to the labor force means their work lives should be increasingly important in understanding the retirement transition of couples. This dissertation fills a gap in retirement research by utilizing a life course perspective to systematically study change across cohorts in how marital partners manage the retirement transition amidst rapid structural changes in the economy. Analyses use multiple waves of data from the Health and Retirement Study, applying a variety of modeling techniques to investigate the way that couples move from employment to retirement. Specifically, I focus on retirement expectations and timing, looking at whether dual earning couples influence and synchronize each other's retirement and how this may change across cohorts. Results suggest that coordination between couples may be declining, as both husbands and wives influence their respective partners' retirement expectations less in later cohorts. Analysis of the degree to which dual-earning couples synchronize their retirement expectations show that such couples expect to retire together when they both have the pension resources to do so. Results from event history models further indicate that the retirement trajectories have changed for the leading baby boom cohort, as evidence implies they are delaying retirement longer than previous cohorts. The findings provide mixed support for the notion that wives are influencing their husbands' retirement timing more in later cohorts or that the influence of husbands on wives' retirement timing has declined across cohorts.Item Living Arrangements and Health of the Elderly in India(2011) Samanta, Tannistha; Vanneman, Reeve; Chen, Feinian; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Do multigenerational (co-residential) families have protective effects on elderly health? Demographic literature on aging in developing countries has started to examine this question as the contours of global population have been undergoing dramatic changes. Nevertheless, the theoretical and empirical literature on the relative benefits for the elderly of residing in multigenerational households versus living alone, have remained remarkably elusive. In part, the empirical inconsistency is a result of a significant methodological gap in the extant literature: most empirical studies are based on cross-sectional data where the authors have been largely unsuccessful in eliminating explanations based on the possible selection effects. India offers an interesting context to study this relationship as the country experiences a growing elderly population coupled with a severe lack of institutional systems of care for the aged. This dissertation draws data from the India Human Development Survey (2004-05) - a nationally representative, multi-topic data set of 41,554 households. It focuses on the relationship between household composition-whether the elderly are living independently, with children, or with other relatives-and short-term morbidity in the last month. The analysis uses standard multivariate regression models and a relatively unconventional technique-propensity score analysis to account for the endogeneity/selectivity problem. Three particularly salient conclusions are drawn from this research. First, household level analyses using propensity score methods highlight the importance of multigenerational families to the health of the elderly. These results also suggest health effects of household wealth, urban location, the number of adults in the household, and (male) gender. A second set of analyses show that multigenerational families also spend more on medical care when the elderly do get sick. Moreover the same set of household variables that predict better elderly health (wealth, urbanization, adults, gender) also predict higher medical expenditures. Finally, multilevel analyses, using district-level data from the Census of India (2001), corroborate the "urban advantage" finding and demonstrate that health of the elderly is affected not only by household compositional factors (e.g. living arrangements) but also by the larger context created by urbanization.Item The Effects of Aging on Lexical Access(2011) Tower, Kathryn Rachel; Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As the U.S. population ages, the need to understand how language changes with age becomes more important. Difficulty with word retrieval is one of the most notable changes as individuals age (Burke & Shafto, 2004); however, theoretical models of aging disagree on the cause. Two prominent theories are the impaired lexical access hypothesis and the general slowing theory. The present study aimed to explore these two ideas using magnetoencephalography (MEG). A young adult group (N=17, mean age 20.6 years) and an older adult group (N=9, mean age =64.6 years) participated in a lexical decision task using verbs. MEG latency data corresponding to lexical access found no between-group difference. Behavioral response times were significantly slower in the older group. Results point either to the idea that linguistic difficulties experienced by older individuals are the result of reduced abilities in phonological or motor processing, or that while lexical representations remain intact, the connections between them become less efficient with age.