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Given the scarce past research on custodial grandparents’ early life circumstances, we investigated frequencies, patterns, and predictors of 14 adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) reported by 355 custodial grandmothers (CGMs). Predominant ACEs were bullying (54.6%), verbal abuse (51.5%), physical abuse (45.4%), and living with a substance abuser (41.1%). Only 11% of CGMs reported 0 ACEs, whereas 52.4% reported >4. Latent class analyses yielded three classes of ACE exposure: minimal (54.1%), physical/emotional abuse (25.9%), and complex (20.0%). Age was the only demographic factor related to ACE class, with the complex class being younger than the other two. MANCOVAs with age as a covariate revealed that different ACE profiles have unique impacts on CGMs’ physical and psychological well-being. We conclude that ACEs are highly prevalent among CGMs and a serious public health concern. Future research addressing ACEs among CGMs is critical in order to support these caregivers and promote resilience in custodial grandfamilies.

Background In general, people are poor at detecting deception. Older adults are even worse than young adults at detecting deceit, which might make them uniquely vulnerable to certain types of financial fraud. One reason for poor deceit detection abilities is that lay theories of cues to deception are not valid. This study compared the effectiveness of two training methods to improve deceit detection among older adults: valid facial cues versus valid verbal cues to deception. Approximately 150 older adults were randomly assigned to facial training, verbal training, or a control condition. Participants completed a pre-test deceit detection task, their assigned training, and a post-test deceit detection task. Results Both training groups significantly improved at recognizing their respectively trained cues after training. However, the facial cue training group were less accurate at detecting deception post-test compared to pre-test and the control group exhibited improved accuracy of deceit detection from pre-test to post-test. Conclusions These results are consistent with the body of literature on deception suggesting people hover around chance accuracy, even after training. Older adults’ facial and verbal cue recognition can be improved with training, but these improvements did not translate into more accurate deceit detection, and actually hampered performance in the facial condition. Older adults showed the most benefit from sheer practice at detecting deception (in the control condition), perhaps because this condition encouraged implicit rather than explicit judgments of deception.

Extant measures of masculinity ideologies assumed masculinities are ageless, were developed with only younger men in mind, and were validated primarily using college-aged adults. The present study reports the development and evaluation of a measure of the masculinity ideologies relevant to the lives of aging men, using a sample (N = 1184) of adult men and women (ages 31-95), the Aging Men's Masculinity Ideologies Inventory (AMMII). An exploratory factor analysis on a randomly selected part of the data revealed a 15-item 5-factor scale, which was supported with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using the balance of the data. An analysis of variance composition through a series of CFA's found that the common (correlated) factors model fit the data best, which suggests that the subscale scores of distinct masculinity ideologies can be used in research, but it would not be advisable to calculate a total scale score to represent a general later-life masculinity ideology. The AMMII demonstrated configural and metric invariance between men and women for the five later life masculinity standards, which indicates that mature and aging women and men share similar beliefs about what is expected of men's later life gender practices. Finding convergent construct evidence for the validity four of the AMMII factors encourages use of this short multidimensional scale. The results are discussed in terms of limitations and implications for research and practice.

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