Mapping Socioemotional Paths from Family-of-Origin Experiences to Midlife Health.

描述（由申请人提供）：迫切需要了解儿童时期的经济困难和家庭压力因素在几十年内侵蚀中年健康的过程。研究一直受到阻碍，依赖于成年人对他们童年环境的回顾性报告。使用一个罕见的纵向数据库，拟议的研究克服了这个问题，回到几十年来使用目击者的童年的个人谁是现在在中年。这个项目将研究成人发展研究（Vaillant，2002年）中最初参与者的中年儿童，他们的生活开始于 社会光谱的两端--市中心的波士顿男孩和哈佛学院的学生--最初是在1939年到1945年进行研究的。这些男人和他们的妻子详细报告了他们在接下来74年的家庭生活。理解上的第二个差距涉及中年人对老龄化的消极态度的起源-这种态度与中年和晚年的发病率和死亡率有关。本研究将探讨自己的父母如何变老与中年儿童对衰老、健康维护和健康的态度之间的联系。它还将研究三种适应不良的情绪处理方式，这些方式在功能失调的家庭中长大的成年人中很常见，与负面的健康后果有关，可能是健康老龄化的重要障碍。 这个项目的重要性在于，它将有助于澄清目击者和回顾性报告在预测中年健康方面的相对效用（目标1），确定父母的老龄化质量对婴儿潮一代对老龄化和中年健康的态度的贡献（目标2），并评估与童年逆境和中年健康状况较差相关的三种特定的适应不良情绪处理方式之间的联系（目标3）。这项研究将结合联合收割机几十年来对婴儿潮一代的童年环境和父母晚年的自我照顾，发病率和死亡率的目击者帐户，以及新收集的关于婴儿潮一代的情绪处理方式，对衰老的态度和健康维护行为的数据，沿着这些中年人的身体功能和健康评估。该方法的创新之处在于：（1）它使用了从父母和研究访谈者那里前瞻性收集的关于童年经济和家庭逆境的罕见数据来了解中年健康，（2）通过澄清父母衰老模型对婴儿潮一代衰老和健康方法变化的贡献，它有可能使对衰老的态度超越目前对文化刻板印象的强调，（3）它关注的是童年逆境遗留下来的高度具体的情绪处理困难，这些困难已被证明是可以通过有针对性的干预措施来改变的，并且与中年健康状况下降有关。这项研究的基本原理是，澄清将家庭经历与中年健康联系起来的具体过程对于设计更有效的干预措施以促进健康老龄化至关重要。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): There is an urgent need to understand the processes by which economic hardship and family stressors in childhood reach across decades to erode midlife health. Research has been hampered by dependence on adults' retrospective reports about their childhood environments. Using a rare longitudinal database, the proposed study overcomes this problem by going back across decades to use eye-witness accounts of the childhoods of individuals who are now in midlife. This project will study the middle-aged children of the original participants in the Study of Adult Development (Vaillant, 2002) who started life at two ends of the social spectrum - inner city Boston boys and Harvard College sophomores - and were originally studied in 1939 to 1945. These men and their wives reported in detail on their family lives over the next 74 years. A second gap in understanding concerns the origin of middle-aged adults' negative attitudes about aging - attitudes which have been linked with morbidity and mortality in mid- and late life. This study will examine links between how one's own parents grow old and middle-aged children's attitudes about aging, health-maintenance, and health. It will also examine three maladaptive styles of emotion processing that are common among adults who grew up in dysfunctional families, are associated with negative health consequences, and may be important obstacles to healthy aging. This project is significant in that it will help clarify the relative utility of eye-witness and retrospective reports of childhoo economic and familial adversity in predicting midlife health (Aim 1), identify the contribution of parents' quality of aging to baby boomers' attitudes about aging and midlife health (Aim 2), and assess links between three specific maladaptive styles of emotion processing that are associated with childhood adversity and poorer health in midlife (Aim 3). The study will combine decades-old eye-witness accounts of baby boomers' childhood environments and parents' late-life self-care, morbidity and mortality with newly-collected data on baby boomers' emotion processing styles, attitudes about aging, and health-maintenance behaviors, along with assessments of these middle-aged adults' physical functioning and health. The approach is innovative in that (1) it uses rare prospectively-collected data from both parents and Study interviewers about childhood economic and familial adversity to understand midlife health, (2) by clarifying the contribution of parental models of aging to variation in baby boomers' approaches to aging and health, it has the potential to move the field of attitudes about aging beyond the current emphasis on cultural stereotypes, and (3) it focuses on highly specific difficulties with emotion processing that are the legacy of childhood adversity, that have been shown to be modifiable through targeted interventions, and that are associated with midlife health decline. The rationale for this research is that clarifying the specific processes that link family-of-origi experiences with midlife health is essential to designing more effective interventions to promote healthy aging.