Familial Loss of a Loved One and Biological Aging: NIMHD Social Epigenomics Program.

Importance: The link between familial loss of a loved one and long-term health decline is complex and not fully understood.

Objective: To test associations of losing a parent, sibling, child, or partner or spouse with accelerated biological aging.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, a US population-based longitudinal cohort study, were analyzed.

Sexual Motives, Stress, and Depressive Symptoms Among Midlife Different-Sex and Same-Sex Couples.

Background And Objectives: Within relationships, sexual motives and stress are independent determinants of psychological health, with notable gendered patterns. However, previous research largely focuses on young adults and different-sex couples. Both sexual motives and levels of stress may be uniquely important to psychological health in midlife, and in potentially different ways for same-sex and different-sex couples.

Racial Differences in Early Parental Death, Midlife Life Problems, and Relationship Strain With Adult Children.

Objectives: Black Americans typically experience the death of a parent earlier in the life course than do non-Hispanic Whites, and early parental death is known to hinder subsequent relationship outcomes. Whether early parental death may contribute to racial differences in midlife family relationships and the role midlife adults' current life problems play remain unexplored.

Method: Using multilevel modeling, we examined how timing of parental death is associated with relationship strain with adult children and whether the association differs by midlife adults' life problems in Black (n = 166) and non-Hispanic White (n = 467) families from the Family Exchanges Study.

Variety Is the Spice of Late Life: Social Integration and Daily Activity.

Objectives: Social integration (involvement with a diverse array of social ties) has been linked to positive outcomes including better physical health. Research has not investigated whether encounters with diverse social ties enhance individuals' daily behaviors. The objectives of this study were to assess whether social ties connect individuals to more diverse daily behaviors, physical activity, and nonsedentary time as well as more positive mood.

Widowhood and depression: new light on gender differences, selection, and psychological adjustment.

Objectives: To document short- and long-term trajectories of depressive symptoms following widowhood and to test whether these trajectories vary by gender and anticipatory spousal loss.

Method: Eight waves of prospective panel data from the Health and Retirement Study, over a 14-year period, are used to evaluate gender differences in depressive symptoms following widowhood in late midlife. Short-term trajectories are modeled using a linear regression of change in Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) score on duration of widowhood.

The times they are a changin': marital status and health differentials from 1972 to 2003.

Although the meanings and rates of being married, divorced, separated, never-married, and widowed have changed significantly over the past several decades, we know very little about historical trends in the relationship between marital status and health. Our analysis of pooled data from the National Health Interview Survey from 1972 to 2003 shows that the self-rated health of the never-married has improved over the past three decades. Moreover, the gap between the married and the never married has steadily converged over time for men but not for women.