Other tasks could have replaced caring for plants, but this study shows
that control and responsibility, extended the lives of nursing home
residents and, tended to improve their level of functioning and, extend
their lives.

Conversely, having no control (such as voting for change and, get Bush
III) should reduce their level of functioning and, shorten their lives.

http://capital2.capital.edu/faculty/...din_Judith.pdf

Long-Term Effects of a Control-Relevant Intervention With
the Institutionalized Aged

In a field study (Langer & Rodin, 1976),
we assessed the effects of an intervention designed
to encourage elderly nursing home
residents to make a greater number of choices
and to feel more control and responsibility
for day-to-day events. The study was intended
to determine whether the decline in
health, alertness, and activity that generally
occurs in the aged in nursing home settings
could be slowed or reversed by choice and
control manipulations that have been shown
to have beneficial effects in other contexts

The hospital administrator gave a talk to
residents in the experimental group emphasizing
their responsibility for themselves,
whereas the communication given to a second,
comparison group stressed the staff's
responsibility for them as patients. To bolster
the communication, residents in the experimental
group were offered plants to care
for, whereas residents in the comparison group
were given plants that were watered by the staff.

The data indicated that residents in the
responsibility-induced group became more
active and reported feeling happier than the
comparison group of residents, who were encouraged
to feel that the staff would care
for them and try to make them happy. Patients
in the responsibility-induced group
also showed a significant improvement in
alertness and increased behavioral involvement
in many different kinds of activities,
such as movie attendance, active socializing
with staff and friends, and contest participation.
In addition to collecting these multiple
questionnaire and behavioral measures at the
time, we have now been able to collect longterm
follow-up data on several variables, including
mortality.

Mortality
The most striking data were obtained in
death rate differences between the two treatment
groups. Taking the 18 months prior to
the original intervention as an arbitrary comparison
period, we found that the average
death rate during that period was 25% for
the entire nursing home. In the subsequent
18-month period following the intervention,
only 7 of the 47 subjects (15%) in the responsibility-
induced group died, whereas 13
of 44 subjects (30%) in the comparison
group had died. Using the arcsine transformation
for frequencies, this difference is
reliable (z = 3.14, p .01).

Because these results were so startling,
we assessed other factors that might have
accounted for the differences. Unfortunately,
we simply cannot know everything about the
equivalency of these subjects prior to the
intervention. We do know that those who
died did not differ reliably in the length of
time that they had been institutionalized
or in their overall health status when the
study began. These means are presented in
Table 4, which also presents the nurses' evaluations
prior to the intervention. From these
ratings it is clear that the nurses had given
lower evaluations prior to the intervention to
those patients who subsequently died than to
those who were still living, F ( l , 48) = 7.73,
p .01. The interaction between treatment
group and the life-death variable was not
significant, however.
--
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100119/...ting_activists
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/19/headlines