PSYCH 216

Gerontology:

Is the scientific study of aging from maturity through old age. This study has changed our understanding of aging and the aging process. 

Ageism:

A form of discrimination against older adults based on their age, which comes about due to myths of aging

Microaggression:

Treating the elderly poorly due to them being slower at the checkout line or bank. Impatience and mistreatment of the elderly.

Myths and Stereotypes About Aging: 

Incapable of making decisions for themselves, contribute little to society, poor memory, bad drivers, can't work out , incapable of learning new things, media portrays older adults as incapable of leading productive lives

Population pyramid:

a graphic technique used to illustrate changes in the age distribution of a population

Demographers:

People who study population trends

The 4 Forces of development: 

Biological Forces, Psychological forces, sociocultural forces, life-cycle forces

Psychological forces:

all internal perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and personality factors (Ex. Cognitive abilities, personality)

Sociocultural forces:

interpersonal, societal, cultural, and ethnic factors (Financial assets, structural racism and other society-wide factors)

Life-cycle forces:

difference in how the same event or combination of biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors affect people (Provide the role of timing that affects the impact of events and circumstances experienced during one's life)

Baltes argue that life-span development consists of dynamic interactions between the following factors:

• As people grow older, they show an age-related reduction in the amount of quality of biologically based resources

• There is an age-related increase in the amount and quality of the culture needed to generate continuously higher growth. Usually this results in a net of slowing of growth as people age

• People show an age-related decline in the efficient with which they use cultural resources

• There is a lack of culture, "old-age friendly" support structures

• Taken together, these four factors create the need to shift more and more resources to maintain function

Cohort:

Group of people born at the same point in time within a specific time span

 The three sets of influences:

Normative history graded influences, Nonnormative influences, Normative age-grated influences

Normative age-graded influences:

Experiences caused by biological, psychological, and sociocultural forces that occur to  most people of a particular age (Puberty, menopause)

Normative history-graded influence:

Events that most people in a specific culture experience at the same time (Biologically caused such as covid-19 pandemic or Psychological such as being subjected to a particular stereotypes or Sociocultural such as systemic discrimination)

Culture:

shared value orientations, norms, beliefs, and customary habits and ways of living. (Important to gerontology).

Ethnicity:

An individual or collective sense if identity based on historical and cultural group membership and related behaviors and beliefs

What can be done to foster the sense of “home” at a nursing home or care facility?

• Being included in the decision and selection of a specific nursing home

• Having prior knowledge of, and positive experience of a specific facility

• Defining the home in terms of family and social relationships rather than place, objects, or total autonomy

• Establish a continuity between home and nursing home

• Reminiscing about home may facilitate adjustment

When communicating with residents do not use…

• Patronizing speech

  • inappropriate speech based on stereotypes of incompetence and dependence

• Infantilization or elderspeak

  • Inappropriate use of first names

  • Terms of endearment— “Honey” “Sweetie”

  • Assumption of greater impairment than may be the case

  • Cajoling to demand compliance

The MESSAGE communication strategies training

Decision-Making Capacity, how well can nursing home residents make decisions regarding their care?

• Cognitive impairment

• Patient Self-Determination Act (PSDA)

• Provide written information at time of admission concerning their right to make treatment decisions

• Assessing a person’s capacity to make medical decisions is difficult and often done during times of crisis.

  • Living will

  • Patients normally give the decision to family members.

The Eden Alternative:

Starts from the premise that skilled care environments are habitats for people rather than facilities for the frail

The green House Project

• Radical departure from the idea of large residential facilities

• Encourages residents to participate in their care through helping with daily tasks

• Personal dignity is maintained, and quality of life is improved.

The Pioneer network

• Similar values to Eden Alternative

• Older persons are valuable to society

• Treating all people with dignity

Special care facilities are a:

• Supportive environment for people with moderate to severe dementia requires certain specialized design and intervention features.

  • Help people function at the highest level possible

  • Special training in working with persons with dementia

  • Design elements that take functional limitations into account (e.g., memory aids like color-coded halls)

  • Residents wear wrist or ankle bands that trigger alarms.

Characteristics of Special Care Units That Provide Research-Based Staff Training

• Effective communication

• Behavioral management techniques

• Appropriate methods for assisting with personal health and hygiene

• Appropriate methods for dealing with incontinence

• Appropriate techniques for handling sexuality

• Effective techniques for controlling wandering

• Appropriate ways of supervising eating

• Appropriate techniques and interventions to address memory failure

• and disorientation

• Appropriate techniques for assisting with mobility

 

Ecology of aging:

(environmental psychology) A field of study that seeks to understand the dynamic relations between older adults and the environments they inhabit

Age-friendly community:

A community that encourages active aging by optimizing opportunities for health, participation, and security in order to enhance quality of life as people age by adapting its structures and services to be accessible to and inclusive of older people with varying needs and capacities

Socioeconomic factors determine:

the level of resources to which a person has access to

Intersectionality:

experiences that reflect combinations of race, ethnicity, gender, ability, or sexual orientation

Primary aging is:

normative, disease-free development during adulthood. Changes in the life-cycle processes in primary aging are an inevitable part of the developmental process; examples include menopause, decline in reaction time, and the loss of family and friends.

Secondary aging is:

developmental changes that are related to disease, lifestyle, and other environmentally induced changes that are not inevitable (e.g., pollution). The progressive loss of intellectual abilities due to Alzheimer's disease and related forms of dementia, or that are caused by systemic disparities in access to core human services.

Tertiary aging is:

the rapid losses that occur shortly before death. An example of tertiary aging is a phenomenon known as terminal drop, in which intellectual abilities show a marked decline in the last few months or years before death.

Chronological age:

is a shorthand way to index time and organize events and dates by using a commonly understood standard the calendar time. (How long we have been around since our birth)

Psychological age:

refers to the functional level of psychological abilities people use to adapt to changing environmental demands (Memory, intelligence, feeling, motivation, and other skills that foster and maintain self-esteem and personal control)

Sociocultural age:

refer to the specific set of roles individuals adopt in relation to other members of the society and culture to which they belong

Emerging Adulthood:

when individuals are not adolescents but not yet fully adults

Established adulthood:

the period between age 30 and 45 when life is intense

Core Issues in development :

The nature-nurture issue, the stability-change issue, the continuity-discontinuity controversy, the universal versus context-specific development controversy

The nature-nurture issue:

Involves the degree to which genetic or hereditary influences (nature) and experiential or environmental influences (nurture) determine the kind of person you are.

The stability-change issue:

concerns the degree to which people remain the same over time.

The continuity-discontinuity controversy:

concerns whether a particular developmental phenomenon represents a smooth progression overtime (continuity) or a series of abrupt shifts (discontinuity).

The universal versus context-specific development controversy:

concerns whether there is just one path of developmental or several.

Cofounding:

One cannot determine which of two or more effects is responsible for the behaviors being observed

Meta-analysis

A powerful tool that determines whether finding generalizes across many studies that used different methods

To conduct research ethically you must:

• Minimize risk to research participants

• Describe the research to the potential participants

• Avoid deception

• Results should be anonymous or confidential

Neuroanatomy:

The study of the structure of the brain

Neuroscience:

The study of the brain

Neuroimaging:

set of techniques in which pictures of the brain are taken in various ways

Two Neuroimaging techniques that are used most often:

Structural Neuroimaging and Functional neuroimaging

Structural neuroimaging:

Provides highly detailed images of anatomical features in the brain

• Includes: X-rays, CT scans, and MRI

Functional neuro Imaging:

Provides an indication of brain activity but not highly anatomical detail

• Includes: SPECT, PET, fMRI, NIRSI

The brain is made up of

neurons

Structural features of a neuron:

Dendrites, Axon,  Neuro-fibers, Terminal Branches, Neurotransmitters

Dendrites:

Act like antenna to receive signals from other nearby neurons

Axon:

Parts of the neuron containing the neuro-fibers

Neuro-fibers:

Are the structures that carry information inside the neuron from the dendrites to the terminal branches

Terminal branches:

endpoints of the neuron

Neurotransmitters travel across the

synapse

Activation Imaging Approach:

Attempts to directly link functional brain activity with cognitive behavioral data (Neuroscience perspective)

• This approach allows real-time investigation of changes un brain function as they affect cognitive performance in older adults

Compensatory changes:

are changes that allow older adults to adapt to inevitable behavioral decline resulting from changes in specific areas of the brain (Neuroscience perspective)

As we age :

• Number of neurons declines

• Number and size of dendrites decreases

• Tangles develop in axon fibers

• Increases in deposits of proteins

• Number of synapses decreases

• These changes occur in greater numbers in diseases such as Alzheimer's disease

White matter:

Neurons that are covered by myelin, an insulating sheath, that transmit information from one part of the cerebral cortex to another or from the cerebral cortex to other parts of the brain

White matter hyperintensities (WMH):

Indicates myelin loss or neural atrophy (Happens as we age)

Diffusion tenson imaging (DTI):

Assesses the rate and direction the water diffuses through the white matter (Happens as we age)

• Provides index of density or structural health of the white matter

Dopamine:

A neuro transmitter associated with higher-level cognitive functioning loke inhibition thoughts and attention and planning

• Including emotion, movement, pleasure, and pain

Dopaminergic system:

Neurons that use dopamine

• Evidence shows that effective functioning of the dopaminergic system is critical for cognitive processes, and that it declines in typical aging

Serotonin:

Involved in several types of brain processes

• For instance: Memory, Mood, Appetite, and Sleep

• Abnormal processing of serotonin has been shown to
  be related to cognitive decline

Acetylcholine :

_________ has an important role in general cognitive
processes and dementia.

•  For instance: Arousal, Sensory perception,

Sustaining attention, Higher-order thinking

• Damage to structures that use ________ is

associated with memory declines.

 

two general approaches to document age-related changes in brain structure:

Correlational approach and Cross-sectional approach

 Correlational approach:

Employing postmortem and imaging analyses of adults’ brains

 Cross-sectional and longitudinal designs:

using brain imaging techniques  Studies have verified that some changes that occur to our brain as we age are:

• the brain shrinks, or atrophies, by late life, generally shrinking about 5% per decade starting around age 40 and perhaps increasing after age 70 in most people. The cerebral cortex gets thinner over this same time.

• The ventricle increase in size

The positivity effect:

Refers to the fact that older adults are often more motivated to derive emotional meaning from life and to maintain positive feelings (Resulting in older adults being more likely to attend to the emotional meaning of information than younger adults)

Theory of mind (ToM):

The ability that helps us understand that other people have beliefs, desires, ideas, feelings, intentions, and viewpoints that are different from our own

•  ____ matters a great deal in everyday life.  Involved in people's sense of empathy, emotional intelligence, characteristics that help us understand another person’s experience and viewpoint.  Research shows age-related decline in ToM

 

Executive function skills are the mental processes that enable us to:

plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully.

Executive function skills rely on three important brain functions:

• working memory (our ability to retain and manipulate distinct pieces of
  information over short periods of time)

• mental flexibility (our ability to sustain or shift attention in response to different
  demands or to apply different rules in different settings)

• self-control (our ability to set priorities and resist impulsive actions or responses).

Executive function skills develop: 

from childhood through emerging adulthood (the late 20s) as the brain continues to mature and completes its creation of major interconnections.

•  Difficulty focusing solely on relevant information

• Due to WMH and reduced volume of prefrontal cortex

Temporal lobe is the:

heart of memory processing

The medial temporal lobe includes:

the hippocampus, amygdala, and nearby support structures

Damage to the medial temporal lobe can result in:  

serious and permanent loss of event-based and time-stamped memories, including aspects of a person's autobiography

As we age the medial temporal lobe _______ normatively:

shrinks

There is drastic shrinkage in the temporal lobe certain diseases on example is:

Alzheimer's disease

Average longevity:

Age at which half the individuals born in a particular year will have died.

Maximum longevity:

The oldest age to which any individual of a species lives.

Active life expectancy:

Living to a healthy, independent old age.

Dependent life expectancy:

Years of living after losing independence.

Bilateral Activation:

both left and right prefrontal areas active

Socio-emotional cognition:

involves previously learned information, memory and emotions

Automatic judgment:

when person reads cues in the environment and quickly and easily without deliberation makes social judgments. (Older adults may rely more on ______ ________ processes then reflective processing)

The Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT):

Proposes that intelligence comes from a distributed and integrated network of neurons in the parietal and frontal areas of the brain

Aging is a life long process that begins at _____ and ends at ______

conception; death

What is a telomere?

tips of chromosomes that shorten with each cell replication

• Plays a major role in aging by adjusting the cells response tos tress and growth stimulations based on cell division and DNA damage and by typical shortening with each cell replication. Healthy telomeres help regulate the cell division and replication process

What is a telomerase?

An enzyme needed in DNA replication to fully reproduce the telomeres when cells divide

• responsible for the length of the telomeres

Plasticity:

Involves the interaction between the brain ans the environment is mostly used to describe the effects of the experience on the structures and function of the neural system

Neural stem cells:

Gives rise to new neurons, persist in adult brains, and can generate new cells through adulthood

Why does our skin wrinkle?

• Four step process

  • First, the outer layer of skin becomes thinner through cell loss, causing the skin to become more fragile.

  • Second, the collagen fibers that make up the connective tissue lose much of their flexibility, making the skin less able to regain its shape after a pinch.

  • Third, elastin fibers in the middle layer of skin lose their ability to keep the skin stretched out, resulting in sagging.

  •  Finally, the underlying layer of fat, which helps provide padding to smooth out the contours, diminishes.

Two environmental causes of wrinkles :

(1) Exposure to ultraviolet rays from the sun, which breaks down the skin's connective tissue, (2) Smoking , which restricts the flow of blood to the skin around the lips, excessive alcohol, lack of fruit and veggies, sweating and making relative facial expressions.

Other skin changes:

• Pigment containing cells decrease

• Age spots, moles

• Varicose veins

Changes in hair for males

• _____ do not lose facial hair

  • This is why we often see bald ___ with facial hair

  • Develop bushy eyebrows and hair growth inside the ear

Changes in hair for females

• ________ gain facial hair

  • Caused by hormonal changes of the body

Changes in Hair

• Individual and gender differences

• Hair loss caused by destruction of germ centers that produce hair follicles

• Graying caused by cessation of pigment production