ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Aging often leads to decreased independence and mobility, which can be detrimental to health and well-being. The growing population of older adults will create a greater need for reliable transportation. AIMS: Explore whether and how lack of transportation has compromised areas of daily lives in older adults. METHODS: 1221 surveys with 36 questions assessing transportation access, usage, and impact on activities were distributed to Chittenden County, Vermont older adults; 252 met criteria for analysis. RESULTS: Older adults reported overwhelming difficulty getting to activities considered important, with 69 % of participants delaying medical appointments due to transportation barriers. Although family and friends represent a primary method of transportation, older adults reported difficulty asking them for help. DISCUSSION: Lack of accessible transportation leads to missed healthcare appointments and social isolation, which may have detrimental effects on older adults' quality of life. CONCLUSION: Many older adults face significant transportation challenges that negatively affect their health and well-being.
Subject(s)
Health Services Accessibility , Transportation , Aged , Aged, 80 and over , Female , Humans , Male , Middle AgedABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a disorder that theoretically and clinically is thought to be associated with persistent and exaggerated negative expectancies. This study used the N400 event-related potential (ERP) to investigate expectancies for threatening endings to ambiguous sentence stems. The N400 ERP is thought to reflect the amount of effort required to integrate a stimulus into a given context. In sentence reading tasks, the N400 is reliably larger when a word is unexpected. METHOD: In this study, fifty-seven trauma survivors of various types (22 with PTSD and 35 without) read ambiguous sentence stems on a computer screen. These sentence stems were completed with either an expected ("The unfortunate man lost his wallet"), unexpected ("The unfortunate man lost his artist"), or threatening word endings ("The unfortunate man lost his leg"). RESULTS: Participants with PTSD, as compared to those without, showed significantly smaller N400s to threatening sentence endings suggesting enhanced expectancies for threat. Behavioral responses supported this conclusion. CONCLUSIONS: These findings are consistent with the clinical presentation of hypervigilance and proposed revisions to the DSM-V that emphasize persistent and exaggerated negative expectations about one's self, others, or the world. Relative to earlier behavioral studies, this work further suggests that this expectancy bias occurs automatically and at the early stages of information processing. The discussion focuses on the potential impact of a negative expectancy bias in PTSD and the value of the ambiguous sentence paradigm for studying PTSD as well as other disorders.