Charting everyday activities in later life: Study protocol of the mobility, activity, and social interactions study (MOASIS).

Prominent theories of aging emphasize the importance of resource allocation processes as a means to maintain functional ability, well-being and quality of life. Little is known about which activities and what activity patterns actually characterize the daily lives of healthy older adults in key domains of functioning, including the spatial, physical, social, and cognitive domains. This study aims to gain a comprehensive understanding of daily activities of community-dwelling older adults over an extended period of time and across a diverse range of activity domains, and to examine associations between daily activities, health and well-being at the within- and between-person levels. It also aims to examine contextual correlates of the relations between daily activities, health, and well-being. At its core, this ambulatory assessment (AA) study with a sample of 150 community-dwelling older adults aged 65 to 91 years measured spatial, physical, social, and cognitive activities across 30 days using a custom-built mobile sensor ("uTrail"), including GPS, accelerometer, and audio recording. In addition, during the first 15 days, self-reports of daily activities, psychological correlates, contexts, and cognitive performance in an ambulatory working memory task were assessed 7 times per day using smartphones. Surrounding the ambulatory assessment period, participants completed an initial baseline assessment including a telephone survey, web-based questionnaires, and a laboratory-based cognitive and physical testing session. They also participated in an intermediate laboratory session in the laboratory at half-time of the 30-day ambulatory assessment period, and finally returned to the laboratory for a posttest assessment. In sum, this is the first study which combines multi-domain activity sensing and self-report ambulatory assessment methods to observe daily life activities as indicators of functional ability in healthy older adults unfolding over an extended period (i.e., 1 month). It offers a unique opportunity to describe and understand the diverse individual real-life functional ability profiles characterizing later life.

Future time perspective and affect in daily life across adulthood and old age: Findings from two micro-longitudinal studies.

OBJECTIVE: Future time perspective (FTP) refers to individuals' perceptions of the future as either open-ended or limited. Despite well-documented individual differences in FTP across the adult life span, little is known about short-term variations of FTP within individuals and the within-person associations between FTP and affective experiences. METHOD: Study 1 used data from a daily diary study over 10 days (N = 564) with a wide age range across the adult life span (M = 48.30). Study 2 used data from an ambulatory assessment study over 10 days (N = 136) obtained from healthy older adults (M = 70.45). RESULTS: Findings suggest that 10% to 20% of the total variance in FTP was within-person and 29% to 62% of the total variance in affect was within-person. Multilevel modeling showed that occasions with a more open-ended FTP were occasions with more positive affect, energetic arousal, calmness, and positive valence, and less negative affect. Age moderated the within-person associations between FTP and positive and negative affect as well as energetic arousal, with weaker associations for older adults. CONCLUSIONS: This research demonstrates the importance of looking at both within-person and between-person differences with respect to the associations between FTP and affective experiences in daily life.

Intra- and interindividual differences in the within-person coupling between daily pain and affect of older adults.

The bidirectional interplay between chronic pain and negative affect is well-established in patient samples. However, less is known about the day-to-day relationship between pain and affect of older adults without severe illnesses and to what extent this association differs within and between individuals. A total of 224 participants (Mage = 77.6, SDage = 6.2) reported their daily experience of pain, impairment by their pain and affect during 21 consecutive days. Multilevel modeling results showed that on days with increased pain individuals also reported less positive affect and more negative affect. Time-lagged results indicated a temporal carry-over from yesterday's pain to today's negative affect but not to today's positive affect. Moreover, on days when individuals reported stronger impairment by their pain, they showed a stronger within-person coupling between daily pain and affect in contrast to days with a weaker experience of daily impairment. Yesterday's pain and today's negative affect were more strongly associated within individuals who reported higher levels of impairment. Interindividual differences in the within-person coupling between daily pain and affect were found with regard to general physical health conditions and general satisfaction with health. This study demonstrated the importance of focusing on within-person couplings between daily pain and affect beyond patient samples in order to better understand the maintenance of emotional stability despite daily hassles in older adults' everyday lives.

Personality trait predictors and mental well-being correlates of exercise frequency across the academic semester.

RATIONALE: Regular exercise is frequently recommended as a means of combating the negative effects of stress on mental health. But, among college students, exercise frequency remains below recommended levels. OBJECTIVE: To better understand exercising behaviors in college students, we examined how exercise patterns change across an academic semester and how these changes relate to personality traits and mental well-being. METHOD: We conducted two longitudinal experience sampling studies, using data from four cohorts of students, spanning four semesters (Fall 2015 - Spring 2017). In Study 1, a large sample of United States college students (cohort 1; N = 1126) reported the number of days they exercised and their levels of happiness, stress, sadness, and anxiety each week over the course of one academic semester (13 weeks). Study 2 (cohorts 2-4; N = 1973) was conducted to replicate our exploratory results from Study 1. RESULTS: Using latent growth curve modeling, we observed the same normative pattern of change across both studies: The average student exercised twice during the first week of the semester and showed consistent decreases in exercise frequency in following weeks. Across both studies, higher initial levels of exercise frequency at the start of the semester were consistently related to higher extraversion, higher conscientiousness, and lower neuroticism. Furthermore, exercise frequency and mental well-being fluctuated together after controlling for time trends in the data: In weeks during which students exercised more than predicted, they also reported being happier and less anxious. CONCLUSIONS: We contextualize the findings with regard to past research and discuss how they can be applied in behavior change interventions to promote students' well-being.

Emotion Regulation, Subjective Well-Being, and Perceived Stress in Daily Life of Geriatric Nurses.

This daily diary study examined the within-person coupling between four emotion regulation strategies and both subjective well-being and perceived stress in daily life of geriatric nurses. Participants (N = 89) described how they regulated their emotions in terms of cognitive reappraisal and suppression. They also indicated their subjective well-being and level of perceived stress each day over 3 weeks. At the within-person level, cognitive reappraisal intended to increase positive emotions was positively associated with higher subjective well-being and negatively associated with perceived stress. Suppression of the expression of positive emotions was negatively associated with subjective well-being and positively associated with perceived stress. However, cognitive reappraisal intended to down-regulate negative emotions and suppression as a strategy to inhibit the expression of negative emotions were not associated with daily well-being or perceived stress. Off-days were rated as days with higher subjective well-being and lower perceived stress in contrast to working days. At the between-person level, individuals who reported more daily negative affect reported increased suppression of positive emotions, corroborating the within-person findings. Moreover, findings indicated that nurses with more years of experience in the job reported higher subjective well-being and less perceived stress. These results provide insights into important daily emotional processes of geriatric nurses, both at workdays and in their leisure time.

Self-reported versus GPS-derived indicators of daily mobility in a sample of healthy older adults.

In light of novel opportunities to use sensor data to observe individuals' day-to-day mobility in the context of healthy aging research, it is important to understand how meaningful mobility indicators can be extracted from such data and to which degree these sensor-derived indicators are comparable to corresponding self-reports. We used sensor (GPS and accelerometer) and self-reported data from 27 healthy older adults (≥67 years) who participated in the MOASIS project over a 30-day period. Based on sensor data we computed three commonly used daily mobility indicators: life space (LS), travel duration using passive (i.e., motorized) modes of transportation (pMOT) and travel duration using active (i.e., non-motorized) modes of transportation (aMOT). We assessed the degree to which these sensor-derived indicators compare to corresponding self-reports at a within-person level, computing intraindividual correlations (iCorrs), subsequently assessing whether iCorrs can be associated with participants' socio-demographic characteristics on a between-person level. Moderate to large positive mean iCorrs between the respective self-reported and sensor-derived indicators were found (r = 0.75 for LS, 0.51 for pMOT and 0.36 for aMOT). In comparison to sensor-derived indicators, self-reported LS slightly underestimates, while self-reported aMOT as well as pMOT considerably overestimate the amount of daily mobility. Participants with access to a car have higher probabilities of agreement in the pMOT indicator. Sensor-based assessments are promising as they are "objective", involve less participant burden and observations can be extended over long periods. The findings of this paper help researchers on mobility and aging to estimate the magnitude and direction of potential differences in the assessed variable due to the assessment methods.