Depressive Symptomatology and Priming Effects Among Younger and Older Adults.

Unlabelled: Background/Study Context: This study examined the potential impact of self-reported depressive symptoms on the age-related capacity for inhibition and suppression, utilizing a negative priming paradigm.

Methods: One hundred eighty-five community-residing adults varying in age (98 younger adults, M = 22; 87 older adults, M = 69) completed a nonconscious priming task, the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI), the Depression Sensitivity Scale (DSS), a free thought suppression task, as well as several measures indexing overall cognitive ability and psychomotor speed. Hierarchical regressions investigated the interaction of depressive symptoms with age and its effect on both positive and negative priming performance, indexing both facilitation and inhibition effects, respectively.

Clinical practice as natural laboratory for psychotherapy research: a guide to case-based time-series analysis.

Both researchers and practitioners need to know more about how laboratory treatment protocols translate to real-world practice settings and how clinical innovations can be systematically tested and communicated to a skeptical scientific community. The single-case time-series study is well suited to opening a productive discourse between practice and laboratory. The appeal of case-based time-series studies, with multiple observations both before and after treatment, is that they enrich our design palette by providing the discipline another way to expand its empirical reach to practice settings and its subject matter to the contingencies of individual change.

Redundancy gain and coactivation in bimodal detection: evidence for the preservation of coactive processing in older adults.

Previous investigations of adult age differences in the redundant signals effect suggest that both older and younger adults benefit from the presentation of redundant information. However, age deficits in divided attention may cause older adults to process redundant information in a different manner. In the present experiment, we tested between two competing explanations for the redundant signals effect: separate activation and coactivation.

Evidence for an activation locus of the word-frequency effect in lexical decision.

The authors report a lexical decision experiment designed to determine whether activation is the locus of the word-frequency effect. K. R.

Age differences in central (semantic) and peripheral processing: the importance of considering both response times and errors.

In this project we examined the effect of adult age on visual word recognition by using combined reaction time (RT) and accuracy methods based on the Hick-Hyman law. This was necessary because separate Brinley analyses of RT and errors resulted in contradicting results. We report the results of a lexical decision task experiment (with 96 younger adults and 97 older adults).

Age differences in overlapping-task performance: evidence for efficient parallel processing in older adults.

Two psychological refractory period (PRP) experiments were conducted to examine overlapping processing in younger and older adults. A shape discrimination task (triangle or rectangle) for Task 1 (T1) and a lexical-decision task (word or nonword) for Task 2 (T2) were used. PRP effects, response time for T2 increasing as stimulus onset synchrony (SOA) decreased, were obtained for both age groups.