Associations Between Health-Related Self-Protection, Diurnal Cortisol, and C-Reactive Protein in Lonely Older Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to examine whether health-related self-protection (e.g., using positive reappraisals or avoiding self-blame) prevents lonely older adults from exhibiting increases in diurnal cortisol secretion and higher levels of C-reactive protein (CRP). METHODS: This longitudinal study (n = 122) examined diurnal cortisol levels (area under the curve) at baseline and 2-year follow-up. Levels of CRP were measured at 6-year follow-up. The main predictors included baseline levels of loneliness and health-related self-protection. RESULTS: Among lonely participants, baseline self-protection predicted an amelioration of 2-year increases in diurnal cortisol volume (β = -.34, p = .03) and lower levels of CRP at 6-year follow-up (β = -.42, p = .006). These significant associations were not found among nonlonely participants (β < .14, p = .33). In addition, mediation analyses demonstrated that the buffering effect of self-protection on lonely older adults' levels of CRP at 6-year follow-up was statistically mediated by 2-year changes in cortisol volume (β = -.16, p = .06). CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that lonely older adults may ameliorate biologic disturbances if they engage in self-protection to cope with their health threats.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".