Bob Knight (psychologist)

Knight is also the editor of Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences which is published on behalf of the Gerontological Society of America.

Research

Knight has researched family caregiving stress and coping issues for more than 20 years. His research program has contributed to model development in stress and coping, especially with regard to cross-cultural differences with the sociocultural stress and coping model, which has been updated in the past year to reflect advances in understanding caregiving stress. The research has included studies of Caucasians, African-Americans, Latinos and Korean-Americans as well as caregivers in Korea and in Spain, and he has published extensively on these topics.

His key findings to date include the existence of a common core model linking behavior problems to appraised burden to poor physical and mental health outcomes. There is evidence for differences between ethnic and national groups in the influence of coping styles and social support in the model and for the influence of cultural values of familial obligation on poor health, usually acting through coping styles or through social support. The proposed project builds on his research by exploring caregivers’ own views of their personal adaptive systems and of the personal and cultural values motivating and sustaining caregiving.

His current research interests include cultural difference in stress and coping models used to understand family caregiving, age differences in the effects of emotion on cognition, and the assessment and facilitation of wisdom in older adults. Knight is also leading the interdisciplinary clinic GAP (Geriatric Assessment Program), now in its pilot stages on the USC campus and also provides counseling to older adults.