2005 WHITE HOUSE CONFERENCE ON AGING LAUNCHES NEW WEB SITE
[29 September 2004 - Washington, D.C.] The White House Conference on Aging (WHCOA) today unveiled its Web site (http://www.whcoa.gov), which houses an array of information about the planning and progress of 2005 White House Conference on Aging. The site not only features architecture for easy navigation and access to information, but also contains a calendar of events and links to other resources. The site is designed to reach a growing number of individuals who increasingly use the Internet to gain information, conduct daily business and lead healthier, better quality lives.

"Today's launch marks the first time a White House Conference on Aging has established a presence on the Web, specifically designed to provide the public with updates and information about the Conference," said Dr. Ann Y. McGee, Executive Director of the 2005 White House Conference on Aging. "We know that the Internet has increasingly become part of every day life for many Americans, thus launching this Web site is an integral component of our ongoing efforts to be responsive to the needs of consumers through the use of modern technology," said McGee.

The WHCOA's new Web site will provide information about the Conference, which is scheduled to take place on October 23-26, 2005 in Washington, D.C. Included on the site will be results of Policy Committee meetings including the development of the Conference agenda, topic areas and the delegate selection, as well as important regional, state and local information related to the Conference. The WHCOA Web site will continue to be updated as information becomes available.

"With computers in more than half of U.S households, and more than one in five seniors online, we hope our new site can serve as a vehicle to effectively communicate our mission and progress on a broader scale. We are looking to the future as we prepare for this historic event," said Policy Chair Dorcas R. Hardy. Twenty-two percent of seniors (about 8 million) were Internet users in 2004, up from 15 percent in 2000, according to a recent study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. This group, together with the country's 78 million baby boomers, makes up the fastest growing Internet population.

"I applaud the White House Conference on Aging for moving quickly to develop a Web site so that more people can learn about the 2005 White House Conference on Aging and the critical issues it advocates on behalf of older Americans," said Josefina G. Carbonell, Assistant Secretary for Aging of the U.S. Administration on Aging.

The mission of the WHCOA is to make policy recommendations to the President and Congress, and to assist the public and private sectors in promoting dignity, health, independence, and economic security of current and future generations of older persons. In addition to addressing issues of the current older population, the 2005 White House Conference has a mandate to focus on needs and impact of those individuals born between 1946 and 1964 (baby boomers).

Upbeat Outlook Offsets Effects of Aging
[13 September 2004 - Atlanta Journal-Constitution] Positive thoughts can help older people maintain their physical and functional health, while negative emotions can cause a rapid decline, say two studies in the September issue of Psychology and Aging. In the first study, University of Texas researchers tracked 1,558 older Mexican-Americans in five southwestern states for seven years. They found those with positive emotions were much less likely to become frail over that time. Positive emotions may have a direct impact on health by influencing chemical and neural responses involved in maintaining homeostatic balance, the researchers suggest. Or positive emotions may indirectly affect health by increasing a person's physical, intellectual, psychological and social resources. In the second study, North Carolina State University researchers found negative stereotypes about aging resulted in a decline of older adults' memory performance. The study concluded that if older adults were treated like competent, productive people, then it's more likely that's how they would perform.

Global action needed to keep aging world healthy, says WHO spokeswoman
[17 September 2004 - canada.com] Maintaining a healthy lifestyle will help deal with the impact of chronic diseases that will accompany a rapidly aging world population, a World Health Organization spokeswoman said Wednesday. "The time to act is now before we are overwhelmed by the number of older people," Silvia Perel Levin of the WHO's Aging and Life Course Program told a national conference on aging. ...

AARP Honors 35 Best Employers for Workers Over 50
[31 August 2004 - AARP] What do a dental benefits administrator, an office technologies and services firm, a financial services company and an auto manufacturer have in common? These diverse companies recruit and retain mature workers � they treat them right � and rank among the 35 employers from across the U.S. that have been named 2004 "AARP Best Employers for Workers Over 50." Simultaneously, AARP released a report spotlighting specific best practices among best employers selected this year � and in the two previous years � in AARP's annual competition. ...

Social & Environmental Factors Play Important Role In How People Age, Two Studies Find
[14 September 2004 - American Psychological Association] Why do some older people experience a rapid decline in their physical and functional health while some of their peers remain healthy and active? While your genes and overall physical health play a role, new research shows how psychosocial factors can also play an important role. Two studies report on this in the September issue of Psychology and Aging, a journal published by the American Psychological Association (APA). In the first study, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston found a link between positive emotions and the onset of frailty in 1,558 initially non-frail older Mexican Americans living in five southwestern states � Texas, California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. This was the first study to examine frailty and the protective role of positive emotions in the largest minority population in the United States. Study authors Glenn Ostir, Ph.D., Kenneth Ottenbacher, Ph.D., and Kyriakos Markides, Ph.D., followed the participants for seven years and assessed frailty by measuring the participants' weight loss, exhaustion, walking speed and grip strength. Positive affect (positive emotions) was measured during the study period by asking the participants how often in the last week "I felt that I was just as good as other people," "I felt hopeful about the future," "I was happy," and "I enjoyed life." ... In the second study, researchers Thomas Hess, Ph.D., Joey Hinson, M.A., and Jill Statham, B.A., from North Carolina State University investigated how negative stereotypes about aging influences older adults' memory. Their study involved 193 participants and two experiments, each with a younger (17 � 35 years old) and older (57 � 82 years old) group of adults. Participants were exposed to stereotype-related words in the context of another task (scrambled sentence, word judgment) in order to prime positive and negative stereotypes of aging. This involved either words reflecting negative stereotypes about aging (brittle, complaining, confused, cranky, feeble, forgot, senile, etc.) or words reflecting positive views of aging (accomplished, active, alert, dignified, distinguished, knowledgeable, successful, etc.) ...

Positive attitude delays ageing
[12 September 2004 - BBC News] You may not be as young as you feel, but research has found that a positive attitude may delay the ageing process. The University of Texas found people with an upbeat view of life were less likely than pessimists to show signs of frailty. The researchers say their findings suggest psychosocial factors - as well as genes and physical health - play a role in how quickly we age. ...

Back to Work: Trends in Post-Retirement Employment
[July 2004 - Michigan Retirement Research Center] Retirement is often modeled as an absorbing state. But in fact, many people return to paid work after they retire - that is, they unretire. Despite an extensive literature on retirement behavior, little is known about unretirement. An individual might go back to work out of economic necessity or for non-pecuniary reasons. For example, people might return to work in order to maintain consumption if they suffer financial shocks or if they failed to plan well. Others might return to work simply because they do not enjoy retirement as much as they expected. From the standpoint of policy interest, whether unretirement is beneficial or detrimental for retirees depends on why people go back to work. In this project, I propose to establish a basic understanding of post-retirement labor supply. I will use the HRS to evaluate how common unretirement is and explore what specific features of the household economic environment are correlated with unretirement. In addition, I will document trends over time using successive panels of the SIPP. ...

Older Workers: Employment and Retirement Trends
[2004 - WHARTON SCHOOL PENSION RESEARCH COUNCIL] The number of people retiring each year affects the size of the labor force, which has a direct impact on the economy's capacity to produce goods and services. Other things equal, fewer retirements in any given year would result in a greater supply of experienced workers available to employers and fewer people relying on savings, pensions, and social security as their main sources of income. Consequently, changes in the age profile of the population or the average age at which people retire have implications for both national income and the size and composition of the federal budget. This chapter describes the aging of the US population and summarizing historical data older workers' labor force participation. Next, we turn to information on older persons' employment and receipt of pension income, which are discussed in the context information on the proportion of workers who claim retired-worker benefits before the full retirement age (65 years and 4 months for people who reach age 65 in 2004). A final section discusses recent proposals to promote phased retirement through amendments to sections of the Internal Revenue Code that govern the taxation of pension income. ...

The rage of the old
[1 August 2004 - The Observer] Great artists are said to mellow as they face the prospect of death. Not so, argued Edward Said, who died last year, in this the final article of a luminous career. ...