dev psych finals

age identity

Questions such as, “To which age group do you belong?” and “How old do you feel?” reflect the concept of —

Carl Jung

- he referred to midlife as the “afternoon of life” ;. Late adulthood as the “evening of life”

“rectangularization

Today, the percentages of people at different ages in the life span are more similar, creating what is called the — of the age distribution

Middle adulthood

• ➢ The developmental period that begins at approximately 40 to 45 years of age and extends to about 60 to 65 years of age;

• ➢ involves “balancing work and relationship responsibilities in the midst of the physical and psychological changes associated with aging”;

• ➢ is the age period in which gains and losses as well as biological and sociocultural factors balance each other

Late midlife

– age period of 55-65; is more likely to be characterized by “the death of a parent, the last child leaving the parental home, becoming a grandparent, the preparation for retirement, and in most cases actual retirement

Baby boomers

have shown a strong interest in plastic surgery and Botox, which may reflect their desire to take control of the aging process

Obesity

increases the probability that an individual will suffer a number of other ailments, among them hypertension, diabetes, and digestive disorder.

Sarcopenia

— is given to age-related loss of muscle mass and strength

Accommodation of the eye

—the ability to focus and maintain an image on the retina—experiences its sharpest decline between 40 and 59 years of age.

• ➢ LDL (low-density lipoprotein) -

• ➢ HDL (high-density lipoprotein). -

Cholesterol comes in two forms:

LDL (low-density lipoprotein)

- is often referred to as “bad” cholesterol because when the level of—is too high, it sticks to the lining of blood vessels, which can lead to atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries).

HDL (high-density lipoprotein).

- is often referred to as “good” cholesterol because when it is high the risk of cardiovascular disease is lessene

Metabolic syndrome

- a condition characterized by hypertension, obesity, and insulin resistance.

Chronic disorders

- characterized by a slow onset and a long duration; rare in early adulthood, increase in middle adulthood, and become common in late adulthood.

Arthritis

is the leading chronic disorder in middle age, followed by hypertension

Men

have a higher incidence of fatal chronic conditions (such as coronary heart disease, cancer, and stroke);

Women

have a higher incidence of nonfatal ones (such as arthritis, varicose veins, and bursitis)

• Immune system

keeps us healthy by recognizing foreign materials such as bacteria, viruses, and tumors and then destroying them

• Natural Killer Cells or NK cells

- are a type of white blood cell that is more likely to be present in low-stress circumstance

Infectious disease

was the main cause of death until the middle of the 20th century

Chronic diseases

are now the main causes of death for individuals in middle adulthood

. • Climacteric

• - the midlife transition in which fertility declines.

Menopause

➢ is the time in middle age, usually in the late forties or early fifties, when a woman’s menstrual periods completely cease. The average age at which women have their last period is 51

estrogen

Menopause is where the production of—by the ovaries declines dramatically, and this decline produces uncomfortable symptoms in some women—“hot flashes,” nausea, fatigue, and rapid heartbeat

Loss of fertility

is an important marker for women—it means that they have to make final decisions about having children

biological clock

➢ Mid-thirties, women who have never had children sometimes speak about being “up against the —” because they cannot postpone choices about having children much longer

Menarche

- a girl’s first menstruation

• Perimenopause

-the transitional period from normal menstrual periods to no menstrual periods at all, which often takes up to 10 years; most common in the forties but can occur in the thirties.

• Hormone replacement therapy (HRT)

augments the declining levels of reproductive hormone production by the ovaries; often prescribed as treatment for unpleasant side effects of menopause.

• Erectile dysfunction

- The inability to adequately achieve and maintain an erection that results in satisfactory sexual performance •

Viagra

works by allowing increased blood flow into the penis, which produces an erection.

• John Horn

argues that some abilities begin to decline in middle age while others increase

• Crystallized intelligence

- an individual’s accumulated information and verbal skills, continues to increase in middle adulthood

• Fluid intelligence

- one’s ability to reason abstractly, begins to decline in the middle adulthood year

Denise Park

- argues that starting in late middle age, more time is needed to learn new information. The slowdown in learning new information has been linked to changes in working memory

Working memory

- The mental “workbench,” where individuals manipulate and assemble information when decision making, problem solving, and comprehending language.

• Expertise

involves having extensive, highly organized knowledge and understanding of a particular domain

Leisure

- The pleasant times after work when individuals are free to pursue activities and interests of their own choosing

• Meaning-making coping

- Involves drawing on beliefs, values, and goals to change the meaning of a stressful situation, especially in times of chronic stress as when a loved one dies

• Erikson

- proposed that middle-aged adults face a significant issue— generativity versus stagnation

• Erikson’s Stage of Generativity Versus Stagnation

- which is the name Erikson gave to the seventh stage in his lifespan theory.

➢ Generativity

encompasses adults’ desire to leave legacies of themselves to the next generation.

➢ Stagnations.

- sometimes called “self-absorption” develops when individuals sense that they have done nothing for the next generation

• biological generativity

• parental generativity,

• work generativity

• cultural generativity

• Middle-aged adults can develop generativity in a number of ways :

biological generativity,

through—adults have offspring.

parental generativity

through — adults nurture and guide children.

work generativity,

➢ Through— adults develop skills that are passed down to others

cultural generativity

➢ Through—, adults create, renovate, or conserve some aspect of culture that ultimately survive

Generative adults

commit themselves to the continuation and improvement of society as a whole through their connection to the next generation; develop a positive legacy of the self and then offer it as a gift to the next generation; increased from the thirties through the fifties.

dream.

• At the end of one’s teens, according to Levinson, a transition from dependence to independence should occur. This transition is marked by the formation of a —

• —an image of the kind of life the youth wants to have, especially in terms of a career and marriage.

Novice phase of adult development.

It is a time of reasonably free experimentation and of testing the dream in the real world.

Becoming One’s Own Man

During the Thirties, he usually focuses on family and career development. In the later years of this period, he enters a phase of —

crisis

Levinson - views midlife as a —, arguing that the middle-aged adult is suspended between the past and the future, trying to cope with this gap that threatens life’s continuity

George Vaillant

involved Harvard University men in their early thirties and in their late forties who initially had been interviewed as undergraduates. He concludes that just as adolescence is a time for detecting parental flaws and discovering the truth about childhood, the forties are a decade of reassessing and recording the truth about the adolescent and adulthood years.

“Grant Study”

(George Vaillant) his study—called the ”—

stage theories

focus on the universals of adult personality development as they try to pin down stages that all individuals go through in their adult lives

• Contemporary life-events approach

- Approach emphasizing that how a life event influences the individual’s development depends not only on the life event, but also on mediating factors, the individual’s adaptation to the life event, the life stage context, and the sociohistorical context.

• Bernice Neugarten

- argues that our values, attitudes, expectations, and behaviors are influenced by the period in which we live; holds that the social environment of a particular age group can alter its social clock.

Social clock

- The timetable according to which individuals are expected to accomplish life’s tasks, such as getting married, having children, or establishing themselves in a career

• “First rate.”

- Conditions that distinguished the lives of women in their early fifties from those of women in other age periods •

“Empty nests,”

- better health, higher income, and more concern for parents. Women in their early fifties showed confidence, involvement, security, and breadth of personality.

Paul Costa and Robert McCrae

- They focus on what are called the Big Five factors of personality,

openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Big Five factors of personality, which are

❖ Openness

✓ Imaginative or practical ✓ Interested in variety or routine ✓ Independent or conforming

❖ Conscientiousness

✓ Organized or disorganized ✓ Careful or careless ✓ Disciplined or impulsive

❖ Extraversion

✓ Sociable or retiring ✓ Fun-loving or somber ✓ Affectionate or reserved

❖ Agreeableness

✓ Softhearted or ruthless ✓ Trusting or suspicious ✓ Helpful or uncooperative

❖ Neuroticism

✓ Calm or anxious ✓ Secure or insecure ✓ Self-satisfied or self-pitying

Cumulative personality model

- of personality development, which states that with time and age people become more adept at interacting with their environment in ways that promote increased stability in personality

• Empty nest syndrome

- A decrease in marital satisfaction after children leave home, because parents derive considerable satisfaction from their children.

• “Permaparenting,”

which can impede not only their adult children’s movement toward independence and responsibility but also their own postparenting lives.

• “Helicopter parents”

is another label used for parents who hover too closely in their effort to ensure that their children succeed in college and adult life

• Grandparenting

can provide a sense of purpose and a feeling of being valued during middle and late adulthood when generative needs are strong

1. formal

2. fun seeking

3. distant

Three styles on how grandparent interact with their grandchildren:

Formal

– the grandparent performed what was considered to be a proper and prescribed role. These grandparents showed a strong interest in their grandchildren, but were careful not to give childrearing advice.

Fun Seeking

–the grandparent was informal and playful. Grandchildren were a source of leisure activity; mutual satisfaction was emphasized

➢ Distant

– the grandparent was benevolent but interaction was infrequent.

“sandwich,” “squeezed,” or “overload”

Middle-aged adults have been described as the —generation because of the responsibilities they have for their adolescent and young adult children on the one hand and their aging parents on the other

Linus Pauling

argued that vitamin C slows the aging process

Roy Walford

fasted two days a week because he believed calorie restriction slows the aging process.

• Life span

- The upper boundary of life, the maximum number of years an individual can live ; the maximum number of years an individual can live, has remained at approximately 120 to 125 years of age

• Life expectancy

is the number of years that the average person born in a particular year will probably live.

• Japan

has the highest life expectancy at birth today (82 years)

•Centenarian

= 100 y/old

Supercentenarian

= 110 y/old

• Young-old

- (65 to 74 years of age)

• Younger older adults

(65 to 84 years age)

• Old-old, or old age

- (75 years and older)

• Oldest-old

85 years and older)

• Functional age

— the person’s actual ability to function

evolutionary, cellular clock theory, free-radical theory, mitochondrial theory, and hormonal stress theory

• Intriguing explanations of why we age are provided by five biological theories:

• Evolutionary theory of aging

- natural selection has not eliminated many harmful conditions and nonadaptive characteristics in older adults; natural selection is linked to reproductive fitness, which only is present in the earlier part of adulthood

Cellular clock theory

-Leonard Hayflick’s theory that cells can divide a maximum of about 75 to 80 times, and that as we age our cells become less capable of dividing

• Leonard Hayflick

- found that cells extracted from adults in their fifties to seventies divided fewer than 75 to 80 times. Based on the ways cells divide; he places the upper limit of the human life-span potential at about 120 to 125 years of age

telomerase

• Injecting the enzyme — into human cells grown in the laboratory has been found to substantially extend the life of the cells beyond the approximately 70 to 80 normal cell divisions

• Free-radical theory

- A microbiological theory of aging that states that people age because inside their cells normal metabolism produces unstable oxygen molecules .These molecules ricochet around inside cells, damaging DNA and other cellular structures

• Free radicals

– unstable oxygen molecules

• Mitochondria

— tiny bodies within cells that supply essential energy for function, growth, and

• Mitochondrial theory -

The theory that aging is caused by the decay of mitochondria, tiny cellular bodies that supply energy for function, growth, and repair.

5 to 10 percent

The brain loses — of its weight between the ages of 20 and 90. Brain volume also decreases