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

描述(由申请人提供)：迫切需要了解童年时期的经济困难和家庭压力经过几十年的影响，侵蚀中年健康的过程。由于依赖成年人关于童年环境的回顾报告，这项研究一直受到阻碍。这项拟议中的研究使用了一个罕见的纵向数据库，通过使用目击者对现在处于中年的人的童年的描述，跨越了几十年来克服了这个问题。这个项目将研究成人发展研究(Vaillant，2002)最初参与者的中年子女，他们的生活始于 社会光谱的两端--波士顿市中心的男孩和哈佛大学的大二学生--最初是在1939年至1945年间进行研究的。这些男人和他们的妻子详细报道了他们在接下来的74年里的家庭生活。理解上的第二个差距涉及中年人对衰老持消极态度的根源--这种态度与中老年的发病率和死亡率有关。这项研究将考察自己的父母如何变老与中年儿童对老龄化、健康维持和健康的态度之间的联系。它还将研究三种不适应的情绪处理方式，这三种方式在在功能失调的家庭长大的成年人中很常见，与负面健康后果有关，可能是健康老龄化的重要障碍。该项目具有重要意义，因为它将有助于澄清亲眼目睹和回顾儿童时期经济和家庭逆境的报告在预测中年健康方面的相对效用(目标1)，确定父母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较差有关的三种特定适应不良情绪处理方式之间的联系(目标3)。这项研究将结合几十年来对婴儿潮一代童年环境和父母晚年自我护理、发病率和死亡率的亲眼目睹描述，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，以及对这些中年人的身体机能和健康的评估。该方法的创新之处在于：(1)它使用从父母和研究采访者那里收集的关于童年经济和家庭逆境的罕见数据，以了解中年健康；(2)通过澄清父母的老龄化模式对婴儿潮一代的老龄化和健康方法的差异的贡献，它有可能使人们对衰老的态度领域超越目前对文化刻板印象的强调；(3)它关注情绪处理方面的高度具体困难，这些困难是童年逆境的遗留问题，已被证明可以通过有针对性的干预来改变，并与中年健康下降有关。这项研究的基本原理是，澄清将原籍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.