Psychophysiological arousal in older adults: A critical review

In Spite of the relatively high prevalence rates of anxiety disorders (AD) and related symptoms, very little is known about the experience, presentati on, and assessment of anxiety in later life. Because the physiology of the autonomic nervous system changes with age, an enhanced understanding of how these developmental changes affect the somatic-physiological response patt erns to anxiety-evoking stimuli among older adults may help explain whether we can generalize current assessment and treatment practices and procedure s for AD from younger to older adults. In this paper, we describe and criti cally evaluate studies that have employed psychophysiological recording of autonomic arousal to anxiety-arousing or stressful stimuli among samples of younger and older adults. The conclusions one can draw from the review are quite limited by both the paucity of relevant literature and the methodolo gical limitations of the published studies. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.