Building the Geropsychology Workforce: A National Survey and Virtual Conference Define Critical Obstacles and Steps Forward.

The number of psychologists prepared to work with older adults falls far short of the demand. In the face of perceptions of a worsening geriatric workforce shortage, we describe the process of developing and implementing a national virtual conference aimed at generating solutions. A preconference survey (n = 174) found fewer applicants than desirable for aging-targeted graduate student, trainee, clinician, or academic positions (58.6%) and decreased student interest in aging (43.7%), with downstream consequences of filling age-targeted positions by those without aging backgrounds (32.3%), difficulty securing funding for aging-related positions (28.7%), and loss of aging-related positions (27.0%). Two fifths (40.7%) felt these problems have worsened as compared to 5 years ago. Qualitative responses provide detailed perspectives on these barriers and strategies generally and in particular as relates to racial and ethnic diversity and academic geropsychology. During a 2-day conference, attendees developed and prioritized strategies. Following a postconference survey to ascertain interest in volunteering, seven work groups were formed that have made progress on these issues. A virtual conference provides an inclusive, cost-effective, and fruitful opportunity to discuss workforce concerns in geropsychology and to generate numerous ideas to promote positive change.

Unusual suspects for Age-Friendly University (AFU) intergenerational classroom exchange: A classroom case study in forensic science.

Intergenerational classroom activities have been used to enhance age inclusivity in higher education in the traditional aging curriculum. As ageism continues to be prevalent, there is a need to extend intergenerational contact across the curriculum. Moreover, intergenerational exchange can be an asset to content learning in diverse classrooms. As part of the Age-Friendly University (AFU) initiative that emphasizes the value of intergenerational teaching and learning, students and older adults were brought together in the present classroom case study in a forensic science course. The older adults residing in the institution's affiliated university-based retirement community (UBRC) developed a mock crime scene scenario for students to solve and engaged with students as they analyzed evidence. Students were surveyed regarding their perceived learning gains and reactions to the intergenerational activity. Students' responses indicated that the intergenerational experience had both a positive impact on content learning and the perceived value of intergenerational exchange to enhance learning in non-aging focused courses.

Students' dementia experience, knowledge, and concern: An opportunity for Age-Friendly University (AFU) programming.

The Age-Friendly University (AFU) initiative was established as a framework to guide higher education in the development of programs, practices, and partnerships that support aging populations. This study examined the need for age-friendly efforts to include dementia-friendly educational opportunities by providing information about undergraduate students' personal experience, knowledge, and concern regarding dementia and Alzheimer's disease (D/AD), along with their interest in D/AD educational support. A total of 106 students responded (30% response rate) to an online survey distributed in diverse classes, with more than 50% of students indicating that they had experience with someone with D/AD, primarily a grandparent. Students showed low levels of knowledge and strong concern about developing D/AD, confirming the need for more dementia-focused efforts. Students also expressed interest in a number of educational activities. These data call for AFU institutions to offer more age-friendly, dementia-friendly programs that provide students with needed information and support related to D/AD.

Assessing Age Inclusivity in Higher Education: Introducing the Age-Friendly Inventory and Campus Climate Survey.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: This study introduces a theoretical framework for assessing age inclusivity in higher education environments and describes the Age-Friendly Inventory and Campus Climate Survey (ICCS). The ICCS measures age-friendly campus practices as reported by administrators, perceptions of age-friendliness by campus constituents, and the fit between objective practices and subjective perceptions as an overall indicator of age inclusivity. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: The ICCS was administered at a public university in the northeastern United States. Administrators completed the Inventory of potential age-friendly campus practices associated with their units. Campus constituents (n = 688) completed the online Campus Climate Survey to assess subjective awareness of these practices, perceived age-friendliness, and personal beliefs about age inclusivity. RESULTS: The Inventory yielded a score of 66% of potential age-friendly practices in place as reported by administrators. The Campus Climate Survey showed low overall perceptions of age-friendliness and varied beliefs about age inclusivity on campus. Fit was measured by comparing the Inventory practices and Campus Climate Survey awareness of the existence of 47 of 73 potential practices. Convergence on this campus showed an awareness of 36% of age-friendly practices. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS: Based on the proposed theoretical framework for age inclusivity, the ICCS offers a way of assessing the age-friendliness of the objective environment across campus functions, the subjective environment across campus constituents, and the fit between subjective and objective environments on campuses. The ICCS will help higher education institutions identify strengths and challenges for advancing age inclusivity.

Assessing Age Inclusivity in Higher Education: Introducing the Age-Friendly Inventory and Campus Climate Survey (ICCS).

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: This study introduces a theoretical framework for assessing age inclusivity in higher education environments and describes the Age-Friendly Inventory and Campus Climate Survey (ICCS). The ICCS measures age-friendly campus practices as reported by administrators, perceptions of age friendliness by campus constituents, and the fit between objective practices and subjective perceptions as an overall indicator of age inclusivity. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: The ICCS was administered at a public university in the northeastern United States. Administrators completed the Inventory of potential age-friendly campus practices associated with their units. Campus constituents (n = 688) completed the online Campus Climate Survey to assess subjective awareness of these practices, perceived age-friendliness, and personal beliefs about age inclusivity. RESULTS: The Inventory yielded a score of 66% of potential age-friendly practices in place as reported by administrators. The Campus Climate Survey showed low overall perceptions of age-friendliness and varied beliefs about age inclusivity on campus. Fit was measured by comparing the Inventory practices and Campus Climate Survey awareness of the existence of 47 of 73 potential practices. Convergence on this campus showed an awareness of 36% of age-friendly practices. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS: Based on the proposed theoretical framework for age inclusivity, the ICCS offers a way of assessing the age-friendliness of the objective environment across campus functions, the subjective environment across campus constituents, and the fit between subjective and objective environments on campuses. The ICCS will help higher education institutions identify strengths and challenges for advancing age inclusivity.

Erratum: Publisher Correction to: An exploration of subjective age, actual age, age awareness, and engagement in everyday.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1007/s10433-019-00534-w.].

An exploration of subjective age, actual age, age awareness, and engagement in everyday behaviors.

Considerable research has documented relationships between subjective age and consequential outcomes such as life satisfaction, daily stress, health, and even mortality. Less is known about associations between the age people perceive themselves to be and everyday behaviors that may serve as the paths to broader life outcomes. To begin to fill this gap, this study explored the frequency with which 196 US adults aged 55-87 years engaged in behaviors reflecting nine behavioral domains. Respondents also answered questions about their subjective age, age awareness, and actual age. Results showed that whereas actual age predicted engagement in some behaviors (e.g., retirement activities), subjective age predicted engagement in most others (e.g., personal, social, grooming, body-focused, trend activities), and age awareness predicted participation in yet others (e.g., medical activities). The present findings provide insights both about age-related everyday behaviors, and the ways that several perceptions of age are differentially linked to their occurrence.

Age-Friendly Universities (AFU): Possibilities and Power in Campus Connections.

Shifting age demographics are reshaping societies and challenging institutions of higher education to respond to aging populations through new approaches to teaching, research, and community engagement. The Age-Friendly University (AFU) initiative offers a set of guiding principles institutions can use to assess the extent to which their programs and practices are age inclusive, as well as identify gaps and opportunities. However, institutions need guiding change models to help them mount more comprehensive, integrated age-friendly efforts. Hirschhorn and May's campaign approach to change in higher education offers one such model. Drawing on its four core elements (i.e., "listen in" to the institution, develop a strategic theme, sweep people in, build the infrastructure), the present paper shows how AFU partners are working to move their age-friendly efforts across their campuses by building connections, coalitions, and partnerships. It is argued that such relationships are essential for achieving and sustaining an institution's age-friendly vision.

Demographic aging and biopower.

The aging of the world's population is an unprecedented recent phenomenon in human history, as for millennia - at least from the Neolithic to the mid-18th century - the age structures of human populations have changed little. The question posed by this anthropological perspective seems at first sight quite simple: how did this aging come to be? We will see that from a demographic point of view, the answer seems trivial: a basic shift in population structure is at the origin. However, we will go further by exploring the historical and political conditions of this transition by mobilizing the Foucauldian notion of biopower. We argue that this notion has the heuristic advantage of linking several core processes at work in the demographic transition. Although our analysis focuses on France to illustrate the notion of biopower in Foucault's work, we also discuss several non-western societies to explain why demographic aging is inevitable across the globe due to biopower strategies and "dispositifs". This article also constitutes a reflexive analysis on our practices as gerontologists and on the widespread "successful aging" concept.

Becoming an Age-Friendly University (AFU): Integrating a retirement community on campus.

As populations age at record rates, institutions must ready themselves to be more age-friendly. Institutions with an affiliated university-based retirement community (UBRC) are particularly poised to adopt the Age-Friendly University (AFU) campus concept. The partnership of Lasell College and Lasell Village is used to illustrate how AFU principles can be implemented to extend older adults' access to various educational opportunities. Specially-designed efforts such as the Talk of Ages program provide intergenerational exchange to facilitate the reciprocal sharing of expertise between different-aged learners and mitigate negative age attitudes. Programs such as Faculty Fellows build capacity to support greater attention to aging education and extend intergenerational connections across the curriculum. Challenges inherent in leadership, awareness, classroom dynamics, and ageism are also explored alongside opportunities that an AFU approach brings in light of such challenges.

Talk of Ages: Using intergenerational classroom modules to engage older and younger students across the curriculum.

Age-friendly college campuses offer opportunities for lifelong learning for students of all ages. University-based retirement communities are especially well aligned with this goal by allowing residents to enroll in college courses. Although this arrangement is a standard educational option for college-linked communities, it can have challenges. In particular, the semester-long schedule may be inconvenient for many older students. The Talk of Ages intergenerational module program described in this case study was designed to offer an alternative curricular format to bring older and younger students together for 1 to 2 weeks in focused course activities. To encourage participation across the curriculum, instructors were urged to draw on existing course content. Initial feedback about the program indicated that instructors as well as older and younger students found the program appealing. Useful suggestions for refining the program were also revealed.

Exploring Life Satisfaction Among Older Adults in Dakar.

Studies on correlates of subjective well-being of older adults are virtually non-existent in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, understanding and improving the well-being of older adults should be a focal point of research and policy directed at this fast growing population. The aim of this study was to assess the links between socio-demographic factors, economic conditions, health, social relations, and the life satisfaction of older adults in Dakar. To this end, a survey was conducted on a sample of 500 dwellers of the Senegalese capital, aged 50 to 100, using the quota method for greater representativeness. Results revealed that with advancing age older adults expressed greater life satisfaction, and that older women were more satisfied than older men. As well, economic conditions were a main predictor of life satisfaction, along with good social relations. In contrast to findings with Western populations, neither self-rated health nor physical disabilities were associated with aging adults' life satisfaction. Findings suggest a number of avenues for future research.

The influence of subjective aging on health and longevity: a meta-analysis of longitudinal data.

Evidence is accumulating on the effects of subjective aging-that is, how individuals perceive their own aging process-on health and survival in later life. The goal of this article is to synthesize findings of existing longitudinal studies through a meta-analysis. A systematic search in PsycInfo, Web of Science, Scopus, and Pubmed resulted in 19 longitudinal studies reporting effects of subjective aging on health, health behaviors, and longevity. The authors combine the outcomes reported in these studies using a random effects meta-analysis, assuming that there would be differences in effect sizes across studies. The meta-analysis resulted in an overall significant effect of subjective aging (likelihood ratio = 1.429; 95% confidence interval = 1.273-1.604; p < .001). The analyses revealed heterogeneity, with stronger effects for studies with a shorter period of follow-up, for studies of health versus survival, for studies with younger participants (average age of the studies varies between 57 and 85 years with a median of 63 years), and for studies in welfare systems where state provisions of welfare are minimal. However, effects did not vary either across different operationalizations of subjective aging or by study quality. Subjective aging has a small significant effect on health, health behaviors, and survival. Further theoretical conceptualizations and empirical studies are needed to determine how subjective aging contributes to health and survival.

Awareness of Aging: Theoretical Considerations on an Emerging Concept.

Humans are able to reflect on and interpret their own aging. Thus, as individuals grow older, calendar age may become increasingly a subjective variable. This theoretical paper proposes the concept of Awareness of Aging (AoA) as a superordinate construct that can serve an integrative function in developmental research on subjective aging. It is argued that the AoA construct can incorporate the theoretical components of other existing concepts by acknowledging that judgments of subjective aging tend to be made on an awareness continuum ranging from pre-conscious/implicit to conscious/explicit. We also argue that processes of AoA are inherently self-related processes and that AoA is a particular aspect of self-awareness that results in specific aging-related self-knowledge. Over time, aging individuals incorporate this self-knowledge into their self-concept and personal identity. We provide theoretical evidence showing that although all major theories of adult development and aging draw on phenomena related to AoA, the explicit incorporation of aging-related awareness processes has been missing. We also provide an overarching framework to illustrate in a heuristic way how AoA in combination and interaction with other influences affects developmental outcomes. Finally, we argue that attention to AoA-related processes has a number of societal and applied implications and thereby addresses issues of applied developmental psychology.

Younger and older adults' beliefs about the experience and expression of emotions across the life span.

OBJECTIVES: Although theorists acknowledge that beliefs about emotions may play a role in age-related emotion behavior, no research has explored these beliefs. This research examined beliefs about the experience and expression of emotions across the life span, especially across the adult years. METHODS: Younger and older adults rated the extent to which infants, children, adolescents, young adults, middle-aged adults, and older adults were likely to experience and express a range of emotions. RESULTS: Younger and older adults held similar beliefs about the course of emotions across the life span. Moreover, these beliefs differed across emotion categories. In particular, although older adults were believed to experience and express fewer highly charged, negative emotions, they were expected to be more likely to experience and express positive, low arousal emotions, as well as negative, low arousal emotions. The experience and expression of positive, high arousal emotions were seen as more characteristic of very young age groups as opposed to older age groups. DISCUSSION: These findings beg questions about if and how beliefs about emotion may affect age-related emotion regulation strategies and other everyday emotion-focused behaviors, as well as social reactions to older adults observed experiencing and expressing particular types of emotions.

Age identity, self-rated health, and life satisfaction among older adults in Dakar, Senegal.

The objectives of this quantitative study were to (1) ascertain to what extent older adults aged 50 and above feel and desire to be younger than their age, and classify themselves as young versus old; (2) compare these patterns with those found among other cross-cultural populations; and (3) assess the extent to which self-rated health and life satisfaction predict age identities. This study was carried out on a sample of 500 dwellers of the Senegalese capital aged 50 and older. This sample was constructed using the quota method to strive for representativeness. Most of the respondents wanted to be younger than their chronological age (51.8 %), but only 27.8 % felt younger than they were. Moreover, 80 % of the sample claimed to be old. Self-rated health predicted felt age and the feeling of being old. Furthermore, the less-satisfied Dakar residents were with their life, the younger they wanted to be. We first discuss our results in a comparative perspective focused on how orientations toward individualism and collectivism could be related to age identity, and on demographic characteristics of the Senegalese population-where life expectancy is 59.3 years old. We then analyze the relevance of age identity dimensions as indicators of successful aging in Dakar.

Social Psychological Face Perception: Why Appearance Matters.

We form first impressions from faces despite warnings not to do so. Moreover, there is considerable agreement in our impressions, which carry significant social outcomes. Appearance matters because some facial qualities are so useful in guiding adaptive behavior that even a trace of those qualities can create an impression. Specifically, the qualities revealed by facial cues that characterize low fitness, babies, emotion, and identity are overgeneralized to people whose facial appearance resembles the unfit (anomalous face overgeneralization), babies (babyface overgeneralization), a particular emotion (emotion face overgeneralization), or a particular identity (familiar face overgeneralization). We review studies that support the overgeneralization hypotheses and recommend research that incorporates additional tenets of the ecological theory from which these hypotheses are derived: the contribution of dynamic and multi-modal stimulus information to face perception; bidirectional relationships between behavior and face perception; perceptual learning mechanisms and social goals that sensitize perceivers to particular information in faces.