Becoming and being an older adult: A mixed methods study of the lived experience of aging.

Purpose: This phenomenological inquiry explored what it is like to become and to be old. The principal aims of this study were to first characterize participants' lived experience of becoming and being an older person, then to determine the extent to which they were aging in a conscious way that evidenced aspects of gerotranscendence, and finally, to contextualize participants' responses within existing research on the phenomenon.

Design And Methods: In a concurrent embedded mixed-methods design using an interpretive inquiry strategy, 17 men and women living independently in their communities responded to questions about their experience of aging and completed measures of gerotranscendence and adjustment to aging and their psychosocial correlates.

Being with a Person in Our Care: Person-Centered Social Work Practice that is Authentically Person-Centered.

Person-centered care (PCC) has emerged over the last several decades as the benchmark for providing quality care for diverse populations, including older adults with multiple chronic conditions that affect daily life. This article critiques current conceptualizations of PCC, including the social work competencies recently developed by the Council on Social Work Education, finding that they do not fully incorporate certain key elements that would make them authentically person-centered. In addition to integrating traditional social work values and practice, social work's PCC should be grounded in the principles of classical Rogerian person-centered counseling and an expanded conceptualization of personhood that incorporates Kitwood's concepts for working with persons with dementia.

Social cognition in nursing home residents with and without cognitive impairment.

Dementia affects the specific cognitive abilities underlying social functioning in ways that are just beginning to be understood. This pilot study compared the performances of 15 nursing home residents with cognitive impairment and 25 without cognitive impairment on a broad range of measures of social-cognitive functioning. The cognitively impaired group scored significantly lower than the unimpaired group on tests of face processing, person perception, and social reasoning but not on tests of affect recognition and the representation of social situations.

Assessment of social cognition in frail older adults and its association with social functioning in the nursing home.

Purpose: The aims of this study were to reliably assess a range of social-cognitive functioning in frail seniors and to examine the association between measures of social cognition and nurses' ratings of residents' social functioning in a nursing home.

Design And Methods: Forty nursing home residents with and without cognitive impairment completed 11 social cognition tasks on two occasions after assessment of their cognitive functioning with the Cambridge Cognitive Examination-Revised (CAMCOG), CAMCOG Executive Function, and two tests of working memory. Staff on the nursing units completed two measures of social behavior.