Research

Current Projects

TWO COVID-19 projects:

1) Reactions to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Together with Ann Pearman (Georgia Tech), we are currently analyzing data from adults all over the United States examining their reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. We recently published a study focusing on challenges facing healthcare professionals that can be dowloaded for free here. We have also published a study of predictors of COVID-19-related stress.

2) Daily Diary Study on Reactions to COVID-19

Also in collaboration with Ann Pearman (Georgia Tech), this 30-day daily diary study examines activities and well-being in adults age 55+ living in the United States. We are currently analyzing these data.

AD Supplement to R01 AG005552 (Social Cognition and Aging)

The parent R01 systematically explores (a) how normative age differences in the costs associated with cognitive activity influence motivation and subsequent activity participation, and (b) the factors that moderate this relationship. The AD supplement will extend this exploration to those with cognitive impairment and AD/ADRD. Like the parent project, the proposed research will focus on identifying personal (e.g., effort associated with participation, negative beliefs about aging) and situational factors (e.g., personal relevance of the activity) that influence the motivation to participate. Because stress in general, and long-term cortisol specifically, are associated with important cognitive outcomes, we will extend the examination of personal and situational factors to include chronic stress. The longitudinal nature of the proposed investigation will also allow us to examine cognitive impairment itself as a source of increased stress.

U.S. Midterm ESCAPED (Election Stress Coping and Prevention Every Day)

The overarching goal of this project is to identify the benefits of coping that can be enacted before an election, and in this particular case, the national midterm election on November 6, 2018. Anticipatory coping efforts are designed to reduce the impact of an upcoming stressor that is likely to occur (Aspinwall & Taylor, 1997), but they have never been examined with respect to elections. We predict that anticipatory coping efforts can maintain or improve health and well-being by reducing the impact of stress (Aspinwall & Taylor, 1997), and we aim to extend this to the national midterm election. Specifically, we tracked anticipatory coping efforts before the election to examine their potential impact on stress that occurs before, during, and after the election.

Daily Investigation of the Czech Election for President (DICE)

We know from our previous work (Neupert, Bellingtier, & Smith, 2018) that Americans’ emotional responses to their own daily stressors were amplified after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. We documented the power of an election influencing the daily lives of participants who were not directly involved in politics. Thus, the purpose of the DICE study is to shift the focus outside the U.S. and to a candidate for president along with his family. We applied a similar methodology as our previous work; we examined the day-to-day fluctuations in stressors, activities, and well-being in a candidate for Czech President and his family in the weeks leading up to the presidential election, the time during the election, and the week after the election.

Combating Stress with MACE (Mindfulness and Anticipatory Coping Everyday)

Some of the biggest threats to health for older adults are related to stressors. Efforts to prevent exposure to or reduce the effects of stress could have tremendous health and cognition benefits for older adults. Although most previous research has focused on the health implications of stressors that have already occurred, our recent work (Neupert, Ennis, Ramsey, & Gall, 2015) suggests that one promising avenue for reducing responses to stressors is focusing on coping behaviors that are used prior to the occurrence of stressors. In this project we investigate mindfulness, commonly defined as “the state of being attentive and aware of what is taking place in the present” (Brown & Ryan, 2003), which is associated with better health and well-being. The overarching goal of this daily diary study is to identify the health, cognition, and well-being benefits for older adults of both trait-like mindfulness and proactive coping characteristics, as well as state-like mindfulness and anticipatory coping processes. We leverage the crowdsourcing tool of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to gather high-quality daily diary data with minimal cost (Boynton & Richman, 2014) from diverse older adults across the U.S.

Proactive Coping for Healthy Aging (the ACED [Anticipatory Coping Every Day] study)

This study uses daily diary methods to address questions of anticipatory coping and daily outcomes. Questions are not framed from a between-person perspective (e.g., adaptive copers vs. maladaptive copers); rather, coping is examined as a dynamic within-person process that can change across days and within stressor domains. Although the field has acknowledged that coping is contextual (Aldwin, 2007) and dynamic (Lazarus, 1999), questions remain framed in between-person terms (e.g., some people cope better with arguments than others) (cf. Roesch et al., 2010). The perspective of this study acknowledges that coping behaviors can change from day to day as well as within stressor contexts. This is a shift toward a truly dynamic coping model, which Lazarus (1999) called for when he described the requirement of an intraindividual research design in which the same individuals are studied in different contexts and at different times. Our contextual and dynamic perspective also permit the examination of pathways to daily health and well-being benefits as they unfold over time within aging individuals’ daily lives.