Key Terms

• Personal fable: Teenagers secretly imagine their lives as fantastical stories of greatness and distinction.

• Midlife stagnation: Maturation expected for dispositional traits, goals, and narrative identity never really happens.

• Despair: An older person rejects their own life as something that has not been good or worthy and they are filled with regrets and recriminations.

• Ego integrity: An older person accepts one’s life as having been a worthwhile endeavour. Shifts the focus from author to reader

• Alzheimer's: Disease that destroys the material out of which narrative identity is to be made, undermining the author’s fundamental reason for being

• Sense of an ending: functions to shape how stories unfold and how characters’ lives develop in good fiction

• Successful aging: fulfilling, attainment of wisdom

• Dementia: eventually strips away the episodic memory upon which the narrative self is built

• Theory of socioemotional selectivity: theory that claims that when people experience a shorter time perspective for the future, they focus on keeping hold of those people and experiences that are most near and dear

Researchers - Theories

• Laura Carstensen: developed the theory of socioemotional selectivity

Experiments

• Long-term planning skills erode in the later years

• Personality stability may decline in the later years of life

• People may reverse the gains they have made on positive personality traits

• The strong rank-order continuity of traits begins to break down in the last years, reversing a lifelong trend

• Negative emotional states increase with age

• After age 75, there are rising levels of N and sharp increases in N have been shown to predict mortality

• Advanced aging brings with it a substantial decline in coping skills and mechanisms for defending against anxiety

• Older adults tend to recall fewer vivid details from their past

Examples

• The concept of adult generativity has sometimes been seen as an artful and creative response to mortality

• Ego integrity shifts the older person’s focus somewhat from author to reader

• The final chapters in people’s lives are as varied as there are people on the earth

• In the final chapter of life, what matters most in the story is relationships

• As people age, their goals are more about maintaining their health and staying close to the people they love

• Social support can go a long way in dampening the negative effects of aging

• The actor, agent and author live together in one personality; not as separate selves but as 3 different psychological perspectives from which the self considers itself

• As people age, traits related to self-regulation (C + A) may begin to decline

• We begin life as social actors, performing in the group and being relentlessly social until the last moment, where we die alone