David M Almeida

• Pennsylvania State University

In recent decades, grandparents have taken more active caregiving roles, with over 10% of U.S. grandparents raising a grandchild for 6+ months. Role theory postulates grandparent caregivers face unique strain due to complex roles as second-time parents, and physical demandingness of caring for children. Given grandparents are already vulnerable to...

Although age differences in coping strategies across adulthood are well-established (Aldwin et al., 2021), little is known about how coping strategies change, especially into later life. Further, studies focused on changes in coping relied on convenience samples (e.g., Brennan et al., 2012; Martin et al., 2008), which may not generalize to all midl...

Loneliness impedes healthy aging. Previous research shows robust findings between loneliness and poor health, including stress-related diseases and conditions (e.g., cardiovascular disease). Less is known about how loneliness experienced in daily life relates to indices of health, such as diurnal cortisol level patterns. The slope of diurnal cortis...

Previous research suggests that physical activity and sleep are important behavioral factors contributing to affective well-being. However, less is known about their simultaneous dynamics in daily life. The current study examines the within-day and across-day associations among affect, moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), and sleep. Data...

Daily memory lapses represent an understudied approach to understanding daily experiences of cognitive functioning. Because family relationships greatly influence individuals’ daily lives, the present study explores how the quality of family relationships impact daily memory lapses and the moderating influence of family relationship quality on the...

Daily stressors have significant effects on cognitive health across the lifespan, but little is known about how daily positive experiences may facilitate better cognitive performance. Leveraging the third wave of a publicly available adult lifespan sample who completed a telephone assessment of cognitive function (i.e., executive function, episodic...

Proximal (i.e., daily) experiences may be a crucial indicator of how larger-scale events, such as trauma, impact health and well-being (Epel et al., 2018). It has also been suggested that military service – especially combat exposure – is a “hidden” variable of aging (Spiro et al., 2016), with positive and negative long-term consequences for well-b...

Daily experiences have broad and far-reaching impacts on physical and mental health. Past work has linked micro-level experiences (e.g., daily stress) to macro-level processes (e.g., anxiety and depression; Charles et al., 2013) with a goal of understanding how day-to-day experiences influence development of physiological and psychological patholog...

Literature identifies perceived control as an important psychosocial resource for healthy aging. How perceived control over aspects of daily life influence the daily stress process, however, remains comparatively less clear. Resolution of daily stressors (e.g., an argument resolved, a leaky pipe fixed) is emerging as a characteristic of the daily s...

Sleep is associated with global cognition, consolidation of memories, and structural & functional integrity of areas of the brain that support healthy cognition. While there has been research on sleep in older adults that indicates associations between poor sleep, cognitive decline, memory performance, and changes in the brain, there has been compa...

Perceived control over daily stressors varies across life and stressor domains, but little is known about the function of perceived control as a protective resource for the impact of daily stressors on affective well-being. Using the third wave of the National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDEIII; N=1,263, Mage=62.62, 57.20% women), we examined how...

Recent research suggests that affect dynamics (e.g., variability) combined with mean levels are important predictors of psychological and physical health outcomes. This study explores the joint effect of affect levels and variability on depression across 10 years among middle-aged and older adults. We used the data from the second and third waves o...

Strong and consistent evidence demonstrates that a risk factor for poorer executive function is elevated levels of perceived stress. More recently, researchers have posited that inflammatory processes may contribute to the association between stress and cognitive declines. Similarly, research suggests that greater sustained inflammation can result...

Adverse economic events can negatively impact various indicators of health, including sleep quality. Sleep quality issues are associated with chronic physical health conditions and poor mental health. While there has been a more established body of work on stress and global indicators of sleep, assessing sleep quality at the daily level can contrib...

Daily stressors are minor but frequent challenges of everyday life (e.g., arguments). Although daily stressors are typically less severe than stressful life events, daily stressors can have more immediate effects on wellbeing. Despite this relevance, there is limited research evaluating the influence of daily stressors on alcohol use in older popul...

The daily within-person association between stress exposure and negative affect (i.e., stress reactivity) has been shown to be predictive of a number of adverse health outcomes (e.g., inflammation, chronic conditions). These findings typically rely on a single burst of daily assessments. Little is known about the influence of long-term changes in d...

Perceived control is an important psychosocial correlate of cognitive health and aging. Most prior research examining this association has focused on global aspects of control, ignoring influences of more dynamic aspects of specific areas of control, such as control over daily stressors. Using data from the third wave of the Midlife in the United S...

Prior research has found that older adults report more frequent positive events compared to younger and middle-aged adults. It remains unknown, however, to what extent age is related to experiencing positive events spread across different positive event types (i.e., positive event diversity, PED). We therefore examined age differences in PED and it...

Perceived control is an important psychosocial resource for health and wellbeing across the lifespan. Global control (i.e., overall perceived control) decreases over time in studies following people every few years to upwards of 10 years. Changes across wider intervals of the lifespan, however, have yet to be examined. Further, how perceived contro...

Increased frequency of exposure and affective responsivity to daily stressors are predictive of future cardiovascular disease (CVD)-related health outcomes and mortality. Profound stress system dysfunction is a hallmark characteristic of major depressive disorder (MDD), likely contributing to MDD-CVD comorbidity. Although a greater increase in nega...

Objectives It has been reported that job demands affect sleep, but how different levels of job demands affect sleep remains unclear. We examined whether curvilinear relationships exist between job demands and multiple sleep health outcomes. Design: Cross-sectional analyses with linear and quadratic effects, using self-administered survey data. Sett...

Perceived control is an important psychosocial resource for healthy aging. Using data from the National Study of Daily Experiences (N=2,021, M=55.82 years, SD=10.35, 57.27% Female), we examined aging-related changes in stressor control across 10 years and compared these trajectories with measures of general control (mastery, constraints). Over 8 co...

Adverse economic events can negatively impact aspects of health, including sleep quality. Poor sleep can increase risk of developing or exacerbating health conditions such as cardiovascular and metabolic disease, cancer, and suicidal ideation. It is critical to examine how economic hardships may amplify health disparities in midlife and aging, a ra...

Research has repeatedly demonstrated that greater affective reactivity to daily stressors is associated with detrimental health outcomes (e.g. inflammation, mortality). However, most research has only considered linear effects, which precludes an examination of whether moderate levels of stress reactivity may be beneficial. Using daily diary data f...

Alcohol use predicts short- and long-term memory impairment. However, it is unclear how alcohol influences subjective memory, which refers to perceptions of one’s own memory functioning. This study examined associations between daily alcohol use and memory lapses (i.e., subjective memory) and evaluated perceived impact of memory lapses on daily lif...

Experiencing a greater number of stressful days is associated with a heightened risk of cardiovascular disease. This study examined whether positive affect reactivity, the trait-like change in positive affect in response to daily stressors, moderates the association between the number of stressful days and blood pressure. Participants were 664 adul...

Perceived control is an important psychosocial correlate of emotional well-being. Using data from the National Study of Daily Experiences (N=1,797, M=55.82 years, SD=10.35, 57.27% Female), we examined how self-reported control over different types of stressors (arguments, avoided arguments, work, home, network) was associated with negative affect (...

Good sleep is necessary for healthy aging, but it may be threatened by work stress. This study connected midlife job characteristics to trajectories of sleep health profiles (within-person configurations of key self-reported facets: duration, regularity, sleep onset latency or SOL, insomnia symptoms, feeling unrested, and napping) over one decade....

Negative consequences of sleep health problems are common in middle-age but poorly understood. This study investigated multidimensional sleep health in middle adulthood and mortality risk. Participants from the Midlife in the United States Study reported sleep characteristics in 2004-2006 (T1; n=9,640, Mage=52.72) and again in 2013-2016 (T2; n=4,33...

Different daily contexts (i.e., social, behavioral, emotional) influence psychological and physical health. In particular, daily contexts change across adulthood and identifying salutary daily contexts is vital for improving the health of middle-aged and older adults. This symposium adds to a burgeoning literature and presents studies that examine...

Past research indicates that an individual’s affective reactivity to daily stressors is associated with elevated levels of inflammatory biomarkers such as interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein. Here, we assessed individuals’ positive and negative affective reactivity to daily stressors, and their association with expression levels of genes in the co...

The current study examined the associations of positive and negative experiences during the Great Recession (GR) with levels of daily well-being. In 2012, participants from the Midlife in the United States Refresher survey reported on their positive or negative GR experiences related to job, housing, or finances. A subsample, selected into the Nati...

Background Measures of financial hardship have been suggested to supplement traditional measures of socioeconomic status (SES) to elucidate household economic well-being. This study formally tested the construct validity of the financial hardship construct and examined its association with markers of inflammation. Methods This study utilized data...

Understanding between and within person variability in personality traits, and the processes of general and perceived stress are essential to understanding how to optimize cognitive health in older adults. It is well known that there is large variation in cognitive change: the pace and direction of change differs greatly across individuals. Persona...

Alcohol use is typically associated with impaired cognitive functioning on tasks related to attention and concentration. However, it remains unclear whether these impairments persist across days in ways that are noticeable to the individual. We examined this using the daily diary project of the Midlife in the United States Refresher cohort. Partici...

Housing insecurity, or limited/unreliable access to quality housing, is a powerful chronic stressor that can negatively affect individual health and well-being. This study extends prior research by examining the effect of multiple forms of housing insecurity on both the mental and physical health of aging adults using the Midlife in the United Stat...

While previous studies evince a strong link between family bereavement and worse cardiovascular functioning, factors that may influence the association remain unexplored. This study examined the relation between experiencing the death of an immediate family member and heart rate variability (HRV) and whether the associations differed by sleep quali...

Affective reactivity to everyday stressful events has been shown to be an important predictor of poor mental and physical health. The purpose of this study was to examine longitudinal changes in daily stress across 30 years of adulthood as a critical first step for understanding aging-related trends in daily stress. We used data from the National S...

Perceived control is an important psychosocial correlate of healthy aging. Using data from the National Study of Daily Experiences (N=1,047, M=55.82 years, SD=10.35, 57.27% Female), we examined cross-sectional age-related differences and longitudinal aging-related change in perceived control over daily stress across 10 years and explored the influe...

Researchers hypothesize that how people react to daily stressful events partly explains the personality-health relationship, yet no study has examined longitudinal associations between these factors. The current study examined the role of negative affect reactivity to daily stressors as a mediating pathway between personality and physical health ou...

This paper examines the association between educational mobility and age-related decrements in kidney function. Data from the main survey and the Biomarker Project of the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) Wave 2 and Refresher samples were combined, resulting in 1,861 adults (54.5% female; age 25-84, Mage=53.37) who self-identified as non-Hispani...

The current study examined the associations between daily financial thoughts, socioeconomic status (SES), and indices of emotional (positive and negative affect (PA/NA)) and physical health (physical symptoms and cortisol). Participants (N = 782) from the National Study of Daily Experiences, a subsample of the Midlife in the United States Refresher...

We examined whether the diversity of daily activities (“activity diversity”) is associated with the diversity of daily emotions (“emodiversity”) and if the association differs by age. Two samples of adults from the Midlife in the United States Study provided activity and emotion data for eight days. Greater activity diversity was associated with gr...

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically changed the structure of our daily lives. One of the most significant changes is a limited opportunity to engage in face-to-face social interactions and enjoy diverse daily activities. This raises a public health concern, because diverse experiences are critical sources of health by increasing social integration,...

The current study examined if control beliefs predict prescription drug misuse (PDM) 10-years later and how problem drinking status moderates this relationship. PDM refers to taking medications without a prescription or in a manner not intended by the prescriber. Older adults are especially vulnerable to PDM due to drug sensitivity, comorbid health...

Broad and even participation across daily activities (“activity diversity”) has been found to be associated with better health. Less is known about who has greater activity diversity. We examined whether personality traits are associated with activity diversity in two independent samples of adults. Data came from the Midlife in the United States St...

Daily experiences of stress and the associated sequelae of affective and physiological changes represent the multiple dimensions of a complex, time-dependent process of how stressors unfold in daily life. Daily diaries capture these time-sensitive processes as they occur under real world conditions. Longitudinal changes in stress processes can then...

To investigate genetic and environmental influences on cortisol levels, mothers of children with fragile X syndrome (FXS) were studied four times over a 7.5-year period. All participants (n=84) were carriers of the FMR1 “premutation”, a genetic condition associated with impaired HPA axis functioning. Genetic variation was indicated by expansions in...

Background. Childhood trauma (CT) increases the risk of adult depression. Buffering effects require an understanding of the underlying persistent risk pathways. This study examined whether daily psychological stress processes – how an individual interprets and affectively responds to minor everyday events – mediate the effect of CT on adult depress...

We examined daily affective vulnerability to short sleep (i.e., individual differences in the extent that sleeping ≤6h predicts next-day affect) as a risk factor for developing chronic conditions 10 years later. Participants (N=1945, ages 35-85, 57% women) from the National Study of Daily Experiences reported sleep duration and affect in daily diar...

Lonely individuals are particularly vulnerable to daily stressors. Yet, less is known about the protective role of daily positive social events on days lonely individuals experience a stressor. The current study examined whether experiencing a positive social event on the same day as a stressor helps lonely individuals maintain their daily emotiona...

Chronic pain is a common condition in later life that is related to high levels of anxiety and depression. One reason why chronic pain is related to affective distress is that this condition may prevent people from deriving the same positive emotions from enjoyable activities. Few studies, however, have examined how exposure and reactivity to daily...

Previous studies note daily emotional well-being and sleep duration as significant correlates of cardiovascular health including cardiometabolic syndrome. However, not much is known about the interactive effects of emotional well-being and sleep. Expanding upon current research, this study examined whether sleep deficiency, defined as having on ave...

Previous studies show that physical activity is beneficial for emotional well-being. This study extends prior research by examining whether engagement in physical activity moderates the association between daily stressor severity and daily emotional well-being. We used data from the second wave of the National Study of Daily Experiences, a sub-proj...

Positive affect is beneficial for regulating negative emotional responses to stressful events. Yet, few studies have examined if positive affect may attenuate negative affect the following day. We examined how both trait positive affect and state positive affect are associated with next day stressor-related negative emotions. Participants (N = 1,58...

This study aimed to examine how stressors and positive events are related to sleep duration in daily life and whether these associations differed by age. The second wave of National Study of Daily Experiences of Midlife in the United States study was used (N=1,851). Reports of daily events was coded as two categorical variables indicating experienc...

Activity diversity is important for psychological well-being and cognitive functioning. Yet, little is known about the relationship between activity diversity and sleep. This study examined how overall and nightly sleep health are associated with activity diversity. Participants (N=1841) from the Midlife in the United States Study II provided activ...

The present study aims to examine whether duration of sleep moderates the relationship between daily stressor severity and headache severity and test age differences in these associations. We used the second wave of the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study and its subproject, the National Study of Daily Experiences (N=1,590). Stress severity...

An increasing number of studies evinces the significant role of sleep in health outcomes including physical symptoms, cardiometabolic functioning, and chronic health conditions. To further advance the field’s knowledge on sleep and health in adulthood, it is necessary to have an integrative understanding of this topic that pulls together short-term...

Age is a strong predictor of declines in kidney function across adulthood. Using data from 2,045 adults (ages 25-84) in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, we examined the life course pathways through which low parental education, through adult SES and body mass index (BMI), was associated with faster age-related declines in kidney func...

Inflammation is a pathway underlying numerous aging-related conditions. Depression is related to elevated inflammation, whereas daily positive events have been linked to lower inflammation; these psychological experiences may interact with age to predict inflammation. The purpose of this study was to examine whether daily positive events moderate t...

Aging theories suggest that diversity of experiences relates to social integration, cognitive reserve, and more psychological resources, all of which are important for successful aging. However, age-related declines may contribute to a monotonous daily life. Emerging studies suggest that activity diversity and positive emotional diversity are assoc...

The hippocampus, implicated in learning, memory, and spatial navigation, is one of the few brain structures that demonstrates neurogenesis across the lifespan. Hippocampal volume (HV), then, may be a marker of exposure to and engagement with novel events and environments, which may in turn be related to cognitive functioning. The present study exam...

The goal of this study was two-fold: 1) to investigate whether gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) adults, compared to heterosexual adults, used alcohol and cigarettes daily to a greater extent, and 2) to test the moderating role of daily stress and well-being on the association between GLB status and alcohol and cigarette use. We analyzed data from 3...

Social Integration has important implications for health and well-being during adulthood. Being socially integrated might be an important resource that helps people to regularly engage in daily positive events. With older age, this resource might become increasingly important. However, being well socially integrated might also mean that people are...

The study of change over time, contexts, cohorts, and people is influenced by the sampling of observations within longitudinal studies. Intensive measurement designs, embedded within long-term longitudinal studies, provide new opportunities to understand changes in dynamic processes, as well as determinants and consequences of these changes over ti...

Background: There is a lack of empirical effort that systematically investigates the clustering of comorbidity among known risk factors (obesity, hypertension, diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, and elevated inflammation) of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and how different types of comorbidity may link differently to kidney function among healthy adult...

BACKGROUND o The trait extraversion is associated with positive affect and social characteristics (gregariousness, assertiveness) o These characteristics manifest in daily life as affective states, behaviors, cognitions, and desires that interact with environmental characteristics 1-3 o Lower extraversion (colloquially "introversion") is associated...

The experience of naturally-occurring stress in daily life has been linked with lower physical activity levels. However, most of this evidence comes from general and static reports of stress. Less is known how different temporal components of everyday stress interfere with physical activity. In a coordinated secondary analysis of data from two stud...

Objective: This paper examines whether multidimensional indicators of objective and subjective socioeconomic status (SES) across the life course can be categorized into latent classes of SES mobility and tests the associations of these categories with inflammation markers among White and Black adults. Methods: Data are from 592 non-Hispanic Whit...

Extensive evidence suggests that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can lead to negative health effects across a lifetime. This study examines the impact of ACEs on the frequency of providing daily support (i.e., unpaid assistance, emotional support, and disability-related assistance) to family members and the moderating effects of ACEs in the as...

The purpose of this study was to characterize the association between recent major life events and depressive symptoms during early adulthood, and to determine whether adolescents with chronically low positive affect or persistent sleep disturbance were more vulnerable to the link between stress and depressive symptoms. Adolescents (n = 147; 63.9%...

Extensive evidence suggests that exposure to childhood abuse can lead to harmful health effects across a lifetime. To contribute to the literature, the current study examined whether and how a history of parental childhood abuse affects exposure to and severity appraisal of daily stressors in adulthood, as well as emotional reactivity to these stre...

Sleep disturbance is a symptom of and a well-known risk factor for depression. Further, atypical functioning of the HPA axis has been linked to the pathogenesis of depression. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of adolescent HPA axis functioning in the link between adolescent sleep problems and later depressive symptoms. Methods: A...

Domain-specific control beliefs typically buffer the influence stressors have on people's negative affect (affective stressor reactivity). However, little is known about the extent to which individuals' control beliefs vary across stressor types and whether such stressor-related control diversity is adaptive for affective well-being. We thus introd...

Although stress is a common experience in everyday life, a clear understanding of how often an individual experiences and reports stress is lacking. Notably, there is little information regarding factors that may influence how frequently stress is reported, including which stress dimension is measured (i.e., stressors—did an event happen, subjectiv...

Objectives: Studies have reported bidirectional associations of sleep with daily stressors and negative mood. Yet we know little about how sleep is associated with workers' daily cognitive interference, or the experience of off-task and distracting thoughts. This study examined whether nightly sleep was associated with next-day cognitive interfere...

Background Despite the epidemiological associations between psychological stress, depression, and increased cardiovascular disease risk, no studies have examined the relation between naturally occurring psychosocial stressors and directly measured microvascular function in adults with major depressive disorder (MDD). We tested the hypothesis that y...

Background and Objectives: Long-term care employees and employees with nonwork caregiving roles are at high risk for sleep problems and fatigue. Little is known, however, about relationships between sleep and fatigue among long-term care employees who occupy nonwork caregiving roles. This study examined whether longer sleep duration and better slee...

The number of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) adults aged 50 and older is projected to reach 5 million in the U.S. by 2030 (Fredriksen-Goldsen, Kim, Shiu, Goldsen, & Emlet, 2015). Older bisexuals experience more negative mental and physical health outcomes when compared to both heterosexuals and other sexual minorities (Fredriksen-Goldsen, Shiu, B...

Advancing age is often characterized by preserved or even enhanced emotion regulation, which is thought to manifest in terms of age-related reductions in the within-person association between stressors and negative affect. Existing research from ecological momentary assessment and end-of-day daily diary studies examining such age-related benefits h...

Objective: Negative affect (NA) reactivity to daily stressors may confer health risks over and above stress exposure, especially in chronically angry adults. This randomized controlled trial tests the hypothesis that a 12-week cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) anger-reduction treatment would decrease NA reactivity to daily stressors assessed via...

Men in the United States are increasingly involved in their children’s lives and currently represent 40% of informal caregivers to dependent relatives or friends aged 18 years and older. Yet much more is known about the health effects of varying family role occupancies for women relative to men. The present research sought to fill this empirical ga...

Emotion variability (the extent to which individuals vary in emotional states over time) has been associated with poorer health indicators (e.g., dysregulated diurnal cortisol) but its associations with inflammation are unknown. In a diverse sample of participants (N=231; aged 25–65; 65% female; 62% Black; 25% Hispanic) we examined if positive emot...

The aims of this present study were to examine whether daily stress elicits engagment in emotional support exchange and whether these associations differ by age. Second waves of Midlife in United Status (MIDUS) and its sub-project data, National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDE), were used (N=1,622, Obs=10,201). Multinomial multilevel model was use...

As bisexuals are the numeric majority of sexual minorities in the US, bisexual aging processes are critical to understand if researchers wish to reduce sexual minority health disparities and promote healthy aging. We used a probability sample of adults from the Midlife in the US (MIDUS) study to assess life satisfaction across an 18-year period. We...

Relatively little is known about lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people’s experiences during their day-to-day lives, such as their daily physical symptoms and emotional states that relate to their overall health and well-being. In the current study, we investigated the associations between sexual orientation and daily reports of stress, physical s...

This paper analyzes the association between latent classes of SES trajectories across the life course and health and well-being in adulthood using latent class analysis (LCA) approach. This study utilized data from 863 (Mage = 50.84) participants who participated in the biomarkers assessment of MIDUS Refresher study. Baseline model assessment indic...

Daily stressors such as interpersonal tensions, work and family demands have been shown to be important predictors of poor health. However, much is less known about individuals who do not experience any stressors. How many adults report living a “stressor-free life”, who are they, and is this beneficial? To answer these questions, we used data from...

The present study aimed to examine the effects of early paternal loss on grip strength among middle-aged and older Korean adults using data from the 2006 Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging. The independent variable was early paternal loss before the age of 18, and the dependent variable was grip strength. A series of regression models were conducte...

The study examined the impact of subjective appraisal of daily stressor exposures on daily salivary alpha-amylase (sAA) regulation, and the moderating effect of early parental abuse on the within-person daily stress physiology. A subsample of adults (N = 670) from the Midlife in the United States Refresher study completed an 8-day daily diary where...

Growing evidence suggests that childhood abuse can lead to devastating health effects across a lifetime. To build on existing knowledge, this study primarily examines whether and how a history of childhood abuse affects exposure and reactivity to daily stressors in later adulthood. Using the National Study of Daily Experiences II, we analyzed a tot...

In examining the dynamics between positive and negative experiences on health, previous studies suggest two possible pathways – the buffering hypothesis and blunting hypothesis. Buffering hypothesis suggests that positive experiences offset the harmful effects of negative experiences, while blunting hypothesis predicts that negative experiences wil...

The prevalence of cardiovascular disease and cognitive impairment is increasing in the growing aging population. Existing studies have demonstrated the association between cardiovascular health and cognitive functioning, but little is known about how these two systems interact with psychosocial factors. Focusing on heart rate recovery (HRR), an ind...