Environmental Factors that Regulate Terminal Decline: Late-Life as a Natural Experiment

终身心理学观点长期以来一直认为，个人生活在为个人发展创造机会和限制的环境中(Baltes，1987)。许多观点，包括人类生态学(Bronfenbrenner，1979)和环境老年学(Wahl，2001)强调了生态因素对发展的重要性。对晚年生活的研究表明，即将到来的死亡为研究变化机制和环境因素如何运作提供了一个自然的极限测试范式。例如，环境顺从的概念表明，随着个人能力的下降，背景特征变得越来越重要(Lawton，1990)。与死亡有关的负担和系统性功能障碍(例如，身体或认知健康下降)给个人的适应和调节系统带来压力；使维持健康和福祉变得越来越困难。因此，晚年健康和幸福感的下降为观察和理解环境调节发育的机制提供了一个独特的机会。我们的总体目标是确定环境的结构特征，这些结构特征是公共健康、干预和预防的可塑性杠杆。从晚年为压力测试提供了一个特别有用的熔炉这一想法出发，我们研究了在面临即将到来的死亡时，个人层面和地区层面的特征是如何调节健康和福祉的。为此，我们结合了心理学和人口统计学的观点，对来自三个高度工业化国家的大量有代表性的已故参与者的多年纵向数据进行了分析。这项为期三年的提案的具体目标是：(1)描述人与人之间在晚年衰退中的差异，并确定最近的个人因素(如死亡年龄、性别、教育、收入、社会融入、知觉控制、认知能力、个性等)的作用。我们还使用模型，将残疾的积累作为晚年变化的主要驱动力，并研究与残疾相关的机制的时间和进程如何对衰退的差异做出贡献。(2)考察远端区域因素在调节个体晚年衰退的进程中所起的作用。使用三水平增长模型，我们将确定晚年不平等的哪些部分是由地区特征解释的，并检查特定的经济、服务、社会和环境的物理特征，这些特征调节着个人的适应和调节。(3)在多个具有国家代表性的数据集中复制环境风险监管者的新兴模型。我们建议的多国性质使我们能够初步洞察正在研究的现象的稳健性，并代表着朝着理解其背景特殊性迈出的关键一步。

Lifespan psychological perspectives have long suggested that individuals live in contexts that create both opportunities for and constraints on individual development (Baltes, 1987). Many perspectives, including human ecology (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) and environmental gerontology (Wahl, 2001) highlight the importance of ecological factors for development. Studies of late-life suggest that impending death provides a natural testing-the-limits paradigm for studying mechanisms of change and how environmental factors operate. For example, the environmental docility notion suggests that contextual features become increasingly important as personal competencies decline (Lawton, 1990). Accumulating mortality-related burdens and systemic dysfunction (e.g., declining physical or cognitive health) stress the adaptive and regulatory systems of individuals; making it increasingly difficult to maintain health and well-being. Late-life declines in health and well-being thus offer a unique opportunity to observe and understand the mechanisms through which the environment regulates development.Our overarching objective is to identify the structural features of the environment that are malleable levers for public health, intervention, and prevention. Working from the idea that late-life provides a particularly useful crucible of stress tests where differences stand out in bas-relief, we examine how individual-level and regional-level characteristics regulate health and well-being in the face of impending death. To do so, we combine psychological and demographic perspectives in the analysis of multi-year longitudinal data obtained from now deceased participants in large, representative samples from three highly industrialized nations.The specific aims of this three-year proposal are:(1) To describe between-person differences in late-life decline and identify the role of proximal individual factors (e.g., age at death, gender, education, income, social embedding, perceived control, cognitive abilities, personality, etc.). We also use models that implicate the accumulation of disability as a major force underlying late-life change and examine how the timing and progression of disability-related mechanisms contribute to differences in decline.(2) To examine the role distal regional factors play in regulating the progression of individual late-life declines. Using three-level growth models, we will identify what portions of late-life inequalities are accounted for by regional characteristics, and examine the specific economic, service, social, and physical characteristics of the environment that regulate individual adaptation and regulation.(3) To replicate the emerging models of environmental risk regulators in multiple nationally representative data sets. The multi-nation nature of our proposal allows initial insights into the robustness of the phenomena under study and represents a key step towards understanding their context specificity.