Search

Financial capacity is an important instrumental activity of daily life that comprises those abilities needed for an individual independently to manage financial affairs in a manner consistent with personal self-interest and values. In this chapter, we examine the topic of financial capacity and decision-making in older adults in our aging society. Specifically, we discuss the crucial phenomenon of cognitive aging and diminished financial capacity, the impact on financial skills of cognitive disorders such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and early warning signs of diminished financial capacity. We present a useful clinical conceptual model of financial capacity, describe different approaches to assessing financial capacity, and then discuss empirical studies of financial capacity in older adults with a focus on patients with MCI and AD. This chapter concludes with sections addressing exciting new neuroimaging investigations of financial decision-making and capacity, the importance of psychiatric and other non-cognitive contributions to financial capacity in aging, and directions for future research.

We hypothesized that a higher proportion of bisexual females (n = 792) and transgender individuals (n = 73) than bisexual males (n = 1,457) would self-report suicidal intent, behavioral difficulties, and mental health treatment. Relative to bisexual males, bisexual females and transgender individuals had significantly higher prevalence rates of suicidal intent, mental health difficulties, and mental health services. Prevalence rates among transgender participants did not vary by sexual orientation. The findings suggest that sexism and heterosexism have an interactive effect that compounds the social weight of oppression and increases risks for overwhelming sexual minorities' adaptive functioning.

University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, and University of Minnesota Medical School This article reviews the methodological and ethical challenges of undertaking research using the Internet. The authors review methodological issues that may compromise the internal and external validity of Internet research, such as representativeness of samples, sample bias, and respondent bias. In addition to reviewing fundamental ethical problems associated with Internet research, the authors review new constraints imposed by Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act legislation. They provide an overview of minimal safeguards needed to maintain the confidentiality of Internet-mediated research.

Word reading is considered a highly over-learned task. If true, then practice should have no effect on its performance or associated functional brain anatomy. We tested this hypothesis in two experiments of skilled readers repeatedly reading the same list of nouns (1 session, 10 runs). In Experiment 1 we used fMRI to monitor the changes in brain activity. In Experiment 2 we recorded voice onset latency reaction times. Neither experiment showed changes as an effect of practice. In a third experiment, Experiment 3, we examined the behavioral effect of prolonged practice on the word association task of verb generation for which reading nouns aloud has served as a control. Both short (1 session, 10 runs) and long term (15 days, 150 runs) effects were noted providing a new perspective on functional anatomical differences between word reading and verb generation previously noted after short periods of practice.