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Pezzuti, L., Artistico, D., Tramutolo, C., Cervone, D., & Black, J. G.

Assessing the efficacy of a brief everyday problem-solving training program for older adults

We developed and evaluated the efficacy of a novel training procedure designed to enhance older adults’ everyday problem-solving ability, namely, their capacity to generate viable solutions for problems of daily living. We developed parallel sets of everyday problems to examine the impact of training on problem-solving ability among a sample of younger and older adults. In Study 1, we administered a one-hour training consisting of a tutored session (experimenter to participant) to improve everyday problem-solving abilities among older adults (60-73 years old). The results indicated that there was a significant enhancement in performance for those subjects trained to solve everyday problems. Training also improved people’s perceived self-efficacy for everyday problem solving. In Study 2, we tested the stability of this novel training procedure on a new sample of younger adults (20-29 years old), young-older adults (65-74 years old) and older adults (75-84 years old). The results corroborated the findings of Study 1 in that participants performed better on everyday problem solving after being specifically trained.

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