Late Adulthood

(Age 60+)

Physical Changes

• Life expectancy v. Healthy life expectancy
• Functional age vs chronological age

Healthy Life Expectancy

USA

Healthy Concerns

Physical Aging

• HLE associated with diet, exercise, lifestyle,  genetics & healthcare
• Primary v Secondary aging
• Increase in autoimmune responses
• Decline in cardiovascular and respiratory systems
• Vision: Rise in cataracts
• Hearing: Continued decline
• Smell: Decreased number of receptors after 60yr
• Taste: reduced sensitivity to 5 basic tastes
• Touch: Declines after age 70

Implicite v. Explicite Memory

• Implicit Memory (& bias)
  • Evidence from research on priming
  • Fragment Completion Task
    • P S_ _ H O _ O G Y
    • (Motsly raed enitre wrods)
• Explicit (Declarative) Memory
  • Episodic memory
  • Semantic memory
  • Associative memory
  • Remote memory
  • Prospective memory

Memory in Late Adulthood

• Implicit memory continues to strengthen in old age
• Steady decline in explicite memory-- mitigated by practice
• Prospective: event-based better than time-based
• Dementia
  • Alzheimer's Disease (AD): early-onset (5%; 40s/50s) , late-onset and familial (<1%, strong genetic component)
  • Proteins known as Prions implicated?

Social Development

Erikson: Integrity v. Despair

• Ego Integrity: See life in larger context, sense of serenity and contentment
• Despair: Feel they have made many wrong decisions , wasted their life
• Peck (1968): Three steps of ego integrity
  1. Ego differentiation—focus on finding ways outside of the career to find self-worth
  2. Body transcendence—focus on psychological strengths
  3. Ego transcendence—focus on a larger, more distant future
• Joan Erikson (1998): Gerotranscendence or "positive aging"

Social Development

• Emotional Expertise (Labouvie-Vief)
  • more in touch with emotions and use them to reflect on life experiences
  • display affect optimization
  • retain a high level of cognitive-affective complexity
• Social Isolation and dependency
  • Loss of spouses, family, friends etc
  • increasing health issues and reduced mobility
  • Health is strong predictor of well-being
  • Retirement
• Nursing homes -- controversial

Social Development

• Disengagement theory
  • mutual withdrawal
• Activity theory
  • social barriers to engagement
• Continuity theory
  • striving to maintain a consistent personal system
• Socioemotional selectivity theory
  • selective interactions and social networks