studies & articles
The Blog
One of the many pleasures of being a professor was feeling the need to stay on top of the research in psychology. When I first learned about the half-life of knowledge, the literature typically said it was 3-5 years in technical fields. As a retired professor, I am still a member of the American Psychological Association and subscribe to a service that delivers abstracts and open-source articles from a large number of journals. As an alumna of Harvard, I also get information from them and I have the time to peruse multiple sources. This is a pleasure most professionals don’t have, especially if they value
work-life balance.
I still love research and, when I was asked to write the blog, I enthusiastically agreed. I try to select articles based on their relevance to practitioners, but also to capture both emerging themes and important corrections. I am hopeful that, moving forward, we will have ways to enable readers to easily engage in conversations with me and each other.
-Dr. Karen Nelson
Growing old and emotional well-being
These two studies both speak to emotional health as people age. First, Charles, Rush, Piazza, Cerino, Mogle & Almeida (2023) published “Growing Old and Being Old: Emotional well-being across adulthood” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Here’s the abstract with some information in bold:
Predictors of aging well
Here, I present two studies, each attempting to better understand what predicts aging well. First, Bergman & Bodner (2022) published “Aging Anxiety in Older Adults: The role of self-esteem and meaning in life” in GeroPsych: The Journal of Gerontopsychology and Geriatric Psychiatry. Here’s their abstract: