Yuval Palgi

University of Haifa | haifa · Department of Gerontology

Subjective views of aging (VoA) play a crucial role in shaping individuals’ physical, mental, and overall well-being. While past research has primarily focused on individual perspectives, recent literature suggests the development of VoA within interpersonal relationships. This study introduces a new scale, the Views of Couple Joint Aging (VoCJA),...

Daily variations in subjective views of aging and their coupling with psychological concomitants are increasingly explored, yet potential cultural differences in these relationships have not been addressed. We, therefore, compared the daily coupling of ageist attitudes with negative affect (NA) across countries included in the Subjective AGES (Agin...

Objectives: Aging may challenge life and even affect individuals’ wellbeing and flourishing. This includes the challenges of diminished social connections and the experience of solitude in later life while seeking to leverage personal strengths. The current study examines two important personal resources, i.e., the skill of positive solitude and th...

Objectives Older adults use semantic context to generate predictions in speech processing, compensating for aging-related sensory and cognitive changes. This study aimed to gauge aging-related changes in effort exertion related to context use. Design The study revisited data from Harel-Arbeli et al. (2023) that used a “visual-world” eye-tracking p...

Objectives The established link between subjective views of aging (VoA) and well-being shows variations across different cultures. Although VoA show daily fluctuations, little is known about cultural differences in such fluctuations and the daily coupling of VoA and well-being. We compared Israeli Arabs to Israeli Jews in the daily coupling of VoA...

Sense of Okayness (SOK) is an emerging concept that describes a person’s ability to remain stable and unshaken in the face of life transitions and hardships. This quality enables effective stress regulation and heightened tolerance to uncertainty. To investigate the possible role of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) in mediating the relation...

The evidence regarding the intergenerational effects of the Holocaust points to a heightened sensitivity to traumatic and stressful events, as well as to threats. These effects were found across at least three generations: the survivors themselves, their children, and their grandchildren. More specifically, this sensitivity is manifested in increas...

Objectives: Aging may challenge life and even affect individuals' well-being and flourishing. This includes challenges of shrinking social relations and being by yourself in old age while using your personal strengths. The current study examines two important personal resources, i.e., the skill of positive solitude and the 24 character-strengths, t...

Positive Solitude (PS) is the decision to use one’s time for a meaningful activity, with a choice made by and for oneself. The purpose of this study is to validate the Italian version of the Positive Solitude Scale (PSS) developed by Palgi et al. (2021a). Data were collected through the administration of a questionnaire to 1,120 Italian adults. Con...

With a growing need for long-term care facilities in general, and for specialized dementia units in particular, it is important to ensure that the architectural layouts of such facilities support the well-being of both the residents and the unit caregivers. This study aimed to investigate correlations between the support provided by the architectur...

BackgroundA rise in loneliness among older adults since the COVID-19 outbreak, even after vaccination, has been highlighted. Loneliness has deleterious consequences, with specific effects on perceptions of the ageing process during the COVID-19 pandemic. Coping with stressful life events and the challenges of ageing may result in a perception of ac...

La présente étude a examiné les relations longitudinales réciproques entre l’âge subjectif (AS) et les deux traits de personnalité que sont l’extraversion et le névrosisme, à un âge avancé. En outre, nous avons évalué le rôle potentiel de l’affect positif (AP) et de l’affect négatif (AN) dans ces parcours. Nous avons interrogé 224 personnes âgées i...

Introduction: Studies of community-dwelling older adults find subjective age affects health and functional outcomes. This study explored whether younger subjective age serves as a protective factor against hospital-associated physical, cognitive, and emotional decline, well-known consequences of hospitalization among the elderly. Methods: The pa...

Mindfulness and emotion regulation through music listening are skills that share some attributes with the skill of positive solitude (PS; defined as an inner choice to dedicate time to a meaningful, enjoyable activity or experience managed by oneself, with or without the presence of others). Nevertheless, little is known about their relationship wi...

Positive solitude is the capacity to choose spending time by yourself in a positive manner. This session provides a wide glance on the advantage of this capacity at the second half of life. The session will try to present new theoretical perspectives regarding this capacity. The lectures will give an opportunity to follow the directions in which re...

Subjective views of aging capture the many ways that people acknowledge, contemplate, and reflect on aging. These views are related to a wide range of health and well-being indicators including emotional well-being, mental health, chronic health conditions, memory functioning, and even life expectancy. However, most of what we know about subjective...

Few studies found cultural differences, both across and within countries, in the association between subjective views of aging (VoA) and psychological concomitants. However, a question remains whether such cultural differences exist on a daily level. We therefore examined cultural differences in daily covariation of VoA and negative affect (NA) wit...

The governing Israeli coalition suggested on Dec 2022 a reform plan that would fundamentally alter the system of checks and balances within Israeli society. According to law experts, the plan would effectively end liberal democracy in Israel. This turn of events sparked the largest protest movement in the 75year history of Israel. The current situa...

The present study describes the development of a new questionnaire for measuring positive solitude. First we will discuss the conceptualization of positive solitude, and refer to the contradictions that exist in the literature regarding this concept. We will then present the theoretical background on which we based our questionnaire, and some empir...

Positive solitude, the choice of being alone to engage in meaningful inner or physical, spiritual, mental, or cognitive activity/ experience, was recently suggested as a stand-alone phenomenon differentiated from loneliness and negative solitude. As loneliness was previously found to have adverse implications for mental health, the present study ex...

Objective: The Russo-Ukrainian War intensified when Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The current study examined whether children (second generation; G2) and grandchildren (third generation; G3) of Holocaust survivors are more preoccupied with the war relative to comparisons. Moreover, whether there was more exacerbation in psycholog...

BACKGROUND Increasing life expectancy has led to a rise in nursing home admissions, a context in which older adults often experience chronic physical and mental health conditions, chronic pain, and reduced well-being. Non-pharmacological approaches are especially important for managing older adult health, including sensory stimulation (SS), and the...

Background Increasing life expectancy has led to a rise in nursing home admissions, a context in which older adults often experience chronic physical and mental health conditions, chronic pain, and reduced well-being. Nonpharmacological approaches are especially important for managing older adults’ chronic pain, mental health conditions (such as an...

Positive solitude (PS), the choice of being alone to engage in meaningful inner or physical, spiritual, mental, or cognitive activity/ experience, was recently suggested as a stand-alone phenomenon differentiated from loneliness and negative solitude. As loneliness was previously found to have adverse implications for mental health, the present stu...

Unfinished business (UB), when individuals appraise their relationship with others or themselves as incomplete or unresolved, entails difficult emotions such as regret, remorse, and guilt. UB is often associated with bereavement and is considered to be a predictor of complicated grief. Here we report two case studies describing the processing of th...

Background: Oral health and its relation to ageing is an important topic often neglected among geriatric populations. Proper oral rehabilitation may aid in alleviating mental health burdens in such populations. Objectives: The present study aimed to explore the association between dental anxiety and ageing anxiety, with regard to the interplay o...

ICD-11 posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and complex PTSD have been understudied in the older population. The study focused on the associations between traumatic exposure before the pandemic, COVID-19 worries, depression, and loneliness with current PTSD and CPTSD among older adults. A random sample of five hundred and twelve Israeli older adult...

This study examined trauma-related and other potential risk factors associated with perceived exacerbation in psychological distress among Israelis due to the Russo-Ukrainian War. Specifically, we assessed how vulnerability factors such as previous traumatic exposure, having relatives and friends affected by the war, media exposure, having a Holoca...

Perceiving one's remaining time until death, can serve as a source of resilience when faced with adversity in the second half of life. The current work is based on a prospective study and examines whether subjective nearness-to-death (SNtD) moderates the association between posttraumatic-stress symptoms (PTSS) and hope among adults in the second ha...

Older adults have been found to use context to facilitate word recognition at least as efficiently as young adults. This may pose a conundrum, as context use is based on cognitive resources that are considered to decrease with aging. The goal of this study was to shed light on this question by testing age-related differences in context use and the...

Objectives: Loneliness functionally varies and is determined by the degree of interaction with others. We examined weekly fluctuations in reported loneliness as a function of frequency of social interactions in old age. We hypothesized that emotional and social components of loneliness would be related to different types of social relationships....

This study focuses on the concepts of subjective age and subjective nearness-to-death (views-of-aging) and examines the association between individuals' chronological age, self, and others' perceptions of these variables and mental health. A total of 267 participants aged 40-95 M = 64.33 provided sociodemographic information and filled out scales a...

Israel became the first country to offer the second COVID-19 booster vaccination. The study tested for the first time, the predictive role of booster-related sense of control (SOC_B), trust and vaccination hesitancy (VH) on adoption of the second-booster among older adults, 7 months later. Four hundred Israelis (≥60 years-old), eligible for the fir...

Subjective age contributes to a range of health and functional outcomes in older adults. Most of the evidence comes from studies in community dwelling older adults. The current study explores whether younger subjective age serves as a protective factor against hospital associated physical, cognitive, and emotional decline. This paper is a secondary...

The directionality between vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19 vaccine side-effects has not been hitherto examined. We hypothesized a nocebo effect, whereby vaccine hesitancy towards the second Pfizer vaccination dose predicts subsequent side-effects for a booster dose, beyond other effects. We expected these nocebo effects to be driven by (mis)informat...

Mindfulness and emotion regulation through music listening are skills that share some attributes with the skill of positive solitude (PS; defined as an inner choice to dedicate time to a meaningful, enjoyable activity or experience managed by oneself, with or without the presence of others). Nevertheless, little is known about their relationship wi...

Adverse life events, such as trauma or stress, along with subjective perceptions regarding the aging self, constitute two issues that influence late-life development. Yet, earlier literature paid less attention to the ways in which these aspects may intersect in old age. The current chapter focuses on what studies of trauma teach us about subjectiv...

This closing chapter discusses the major advances in theory, research, and practice to show that the field of subjective views of aging (VoA) has indeed reached a qualitatively new developmental stage. At the theoretical level there is an increasing consensus that a lifespan developmental perspective may be most appropriate to study VoA across the...

The aim of this chapter is to summarize recent developments in the field of subjective views of aging (VoA) by focusing on three major perspectives: The theoretical, empirical, and translational perspective. In terms of the theoretical perspective, we believe it is time to expand the framework of VoA by incorporating related concepts (e.g., (non)es...

To guide the reader, this opening chapter provides an orientation to the chapters in this volume. The main ideas and findings of each chapter are briefly described and the implications for the overall field are discussed. Thus, the reader can obtain an overview of the depth and breadth of the topics covered in the subsequent chapters. The chapter’s...

Subjective age, the personal sense of how old one feels, is an important concomitant of posttraumatic outcomes in the second half of life. The present study aims to disentangle the interrelationships between posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms (PTSS) and subjective age, during the COVID-19 pandemic, among a sample of Israeli older adults who are...

Objective: The study aimed to examine the interpersonal relationships between family involvement (i.e., emotional and behavioral strategies that underscore family members’ well-being and familial legacy) and secondary traumatization (i.e., symptoms of distress resulting from close contact with a traumatized individual) in Holocaust survivors and co...

Our sense of entitlement influences our interactions and attitudes in a range of specific relational contexts, one of them being aging parents’ relationships with their adult children. This study aimed to examine the factor structure of the Sense of Relational Entitlement—aging parents toward their offspring (SRE-ao), an 11-item questionnaire that...

The directionality between vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19 vaccine side-effects was not hitherto examined. Aligned with nocebo effects, vaccine hesitancy to the second Pfizer vaccination dose should predict subsequent side-effects to the booster dose, over and beyond all other effects. Furthermore, consistent with nocebo effects being driven by (mis...

Introduction: The current study aimed to find reciprocal effects between subjective age and functional independence during rehabilitation from osteoporotic fractures and stroke and whether these effects can be mediated by indicators of well-being. Methods: Participants were 194 older adults (mean age = 78.32 years, SD = 7.37; 64.8% women) who we...

Subjective age (i.e., feeling younger/older than one’s chronological age) plays a significant role in older minority group members’ psychological well-being. Due to the importance of vaccinations for fighting COVID-19, it is unclear whether ethnicity and subjective age moderate the connection between receiving COVID-19 vaccinations and anxiety in I...

This study examined the associations between nursing aides’ mentalization, expressed emotion, and observed sensitivity towards their residents with dementia. The study also explored whether nursing aides’ mentalization and expressed emotion are relational constructs that vary with residents’ characteristics and behavior. To assess mentalization and...

Background: Homecare organisations employ professionals (i.e. gerontologists, nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapists and social workers) to help their clients gain rights and supervise non-professional formal caregivers. Formal caregivers, and especially those who work closely with impaired older people, are at greater risk of infecting...

Israel became the first country to offer the booster COVID-19 vaccination. The study tested for the first time the role of sense of control (SOC) due to vaccinations, trust and vaccination hesitancy (VH), and their association with compliance to the booster COVID-19 vaccine among older adults, during the first 2 weeks of the campaign. 400 Israeli c...

When planning long-term care facilities (LTCFs), architects strive to design buildings that support high well-being (WB) levels for those who live and work in them. To achieve this goal, architects must understand what defines WB in old age and how these qualities can be achieved through the designed physical layout. This task must be achieved whil...

Objectives The aim of the current study was to identify difficulties in adapting to normal life once COVID-19 lockdown has been lifted. Israel was used as a case study, as COVID-19 social restrictions, including a nation-wide lockdown, were lifted almost completely by mid-April 2021, following a large-scale vaccination operation. Methods A sample...

This cross-sectional study examined whether views of aging (VoA) relate to subjective cognitive complaints in two separate cohorts of older adults. Ageist attitudes, attitudes to aging (psychological loss, physical change, and psychological growth), subjective age, and subjective successful aging were examined. A moderating effect of chronological...

In this paper, we report the development of the five-item Brief Coronavirus Threat Scale(BCTS) to assess perceived coronavirus threat. Using exploratory (Study 1, N = 735) and confirmatory (Study 2, N = 3,977) factor analysis, we substantiate the structural validity of the scale with North American, European, Israeli, and Chinese adults. Additional...

Background With the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, the aging population has been shown to be highly vulnerable. As a result, policy makers and the media urged older adults to restrict social interactions, placing them at greater risk of mental health problems, such as depression. However, there ha...

Objectives This study examined the emotional availability of nursing aide-resident with dementia dyads in a long-term care-facility. Emotional availability refers to the nursing aide’s sensitivity toward the resident, structuring their interactions in a non-intrusive and non-hostile manner and the resident’s responsiveness to and involvement of the...

The current set of studies was aimed at examining the theoretical basis, development process, and psychometric properties of a new scale for measuring positive solitude (PS). The theoretical idea behind the development of this construct was to develop a stand-alone scale for measuring the positive aspects of an individual's ability to volitionally...

Background: Existing research on post-traumatic sequelae suggests a positive association between fatalism and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, the associations between fatalism and the new ICD-11 diagnosis of complex PTSD (CPTSD) have never been explored before. Objective: The current study explored the association bet...

Aging in Israel frequently entails coping with a unique intertwinement of age-related losses and exposure to traumatic events. This chapter focuses on the central role that meaning in life plays in the struggle of older adults against the double burden of aging and traumatic adversity. The chapter consists of three main sections. The first section...

Objectives The present study examined the longitudinal relationships between subjective age (SA) and future functional status in later life, via depressive symptoms. Additionally, we assessed the role of subjective nearness to death (SNtD) as a potential moderator within these pathways. Methods Older adults (average age 81.14 at T1) were interview...

Loneliness is prevalent in old age and is associated with reduced positive social interactions. Building on studies showing that oxytocin (OT) levels rise during social interactions, we hypothesized that following participation in positive social interaction involving synchronized movements, OT levels would increase, while state loneliness levels w...

Objective Given previous evidence linking depression and vaccine hesitancy, the current study examined if COVID-19 vaccination side-effects are associated with depressive symptoms in older adults. Methods The survey was conducted by iPanel (a company that uses a probability-based panel) to obtain a good representation of vaccinated Israeli older a...

This is the first study to examine COVID-19 vaccine-related stressors in the context of current posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms amongst older adults exposed to traumatic events prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, with particular focus on the associations between ageism, vaccine-related stressors and PTSD. Five hundred and sixty-three part...

Objective To understand if attitudes to aging mediate the reciprocal effects of health anxiety and physical functioning among older adults with medical conditions. We examined: (1) if these effects are reciprocal; (2) if attitudes to aging (psychological loss, psychological growth, physical change) play a mediating role in these effects. Design A...

This study examined how existential fears are related to COVID-19 vaccination anxiety and followed the terror management theory by examining the contribution of two existential concerns, subjective nearness to death (SNtD) and death anxiety to COVID-19 vaccination anxiety during the first month of COVID-19 vaccinations. Data were collected between...

The present study examined the intergenerational transmission of the Holocaust trauma in relation to levels of secondary traumatization and event centrality across three generations in a cross-sectional survey. Participants included 92 Holocaust survivor-offspring-grandchild triads (Holocaust G1-G2-G3) and 67 comparison triads (Comparison G1-G2-G3)...

In this study, we evaluated whether levels of receptive arts engagement (visiting museums/concerts/the theater/the cinema) during the year preceding the COVID-19 outbreak may have served as a psychological resource for older adults that mitigated the association between resilience levels and COVID-19 anxiety when the pandemic broke out. Data were c...

Background The present study examined whether subjective accelerated aging moderated the relationship between COVID-19 health worries and COVID-19 peritraumatic distress among older adults. Method The sample consisted of 277 older adults (M = 69.58, s.d. = 6.73, range 60–92) who answered an online questionnaire during the outbreak of COVID-19 pand...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had pronounced effects on individuals' psychological well-being around the world. Concerns regarding the consequences of infection, as well as the general uncertainty and governmental regulations have resulted in increased psychological distress among many populations and cultures. In this regard, research has shown that t...

The current study examined how reported early life experiences of isolation encountered by Holocaust survivors affect the relationship between their current feeling of loneliness/feeling of positive solitude and their level of posttraumatic stress symptoms. To this end, using a convenient sampling methodology 81 community-dwelling older adults repo...

For 50 free copies: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1cqzHbXYijZ6L Background The widespread COVID-19 vaccination program, issued by the Israel Government, provides a unique opportunity to examine psychiatric morbidity and vaccine attitudes among individuals who have already been vaccinated. Accordingly, the current study examined how vaccination...

Purpose The study examined age-related differences in the use of semantic context and in the effect of semantic competition in spoken sentence processing. We used offline (response latency) and online (eye gaze) measures, using the “visual world” eye-tracking paradigm. Method Thirty younger and 30 older adults heard sentences related to one of fou...

Objectives Some degree of mental distress is commonly present in old age, and it is often exacerbated in later life following changes in physical health. This work presents in two studies among samples that have been exposed to stressful experiences in the past, a prospective examination of how the association between physical health and mental dis...

Objectives The aim of this study was to explore old persons’ experiences of positive solitude (PS) and the gaps between their experience and professional caregivers’ perceptions of older adults’ experiences of PS. Moreover, we attempt to understand the basic mechanism that may explain these gaps. Design A qualitative method was used. Participants...

This study examined the relationship between media use, experiences of media use as having a negative and/or positive impact on coping, peritraumatic distress, anxiety symptoms and resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. A convenience sample of 902 Israeli adults (mean age = 46.21) completed measures of peritraumatic distress, anxiety symptoms and...

Ageism has been associated with negative perceptions of the future and the aging process. The current study argues that this connection is affected by the relevance older adults attribute to the cognitive category of age in their own self-appraisal, as well as by how they perceive this awareness in others. Accordingly, we examined the association b...