Chapter 1- Psychology of Aging

Plasticity (lifespan perspective)

Ones capacity is not predetermined or set in concrete - Many skills can be trained or improved with practice, even late in life. - Malleable- we can change and grow

tertiary aging

Rapid losses that occur shortly before death. -Example: the phenomenon known as terminal drop, in which intellectual abilities show a marked decline in the last few years before death

Time of Measurement Effects

Reflect differences stemming from sociocultural, environmental, historical, or other events at theme the data are obtained from the participants. - Historical events that effects almost everybody at a given point in history: 9/11 or The Great Depression

Many of the most damaging stereotypes about aging are based on faulty.....

assumptions about sociocultural age.

What is Sociocultural age judged on?

behavior and habits such as style of dress, customs, language, and interpersonal style

How are the results of a correlation study measured?

by computing a correlation coefficient, abbreviated "r".

What is the early and later phase of the lifespan perspective characterized by?

early- rapid age-related increases in people's size and abilities later- changes in size are slow but abilities continue to develop as people continue to adapt to the environment

We know that some forms of Alzheimer's disease are genetically linked, but whether one actually gets Alzheimers disease and how the disease progresses may be due too

environmental factors

Reliability

of a measure is the extent to which it provides a content index of the behavior or topic of interest - A measure of memory is reliable to the extent that it gives a consistent estimate of performance each time you administer it -Ex: Reliable measure of retirement attitudes, we want our measurement tool to stay reliable over time

What does the lifespan perceptive emphasize?

that human development takes a lifetime to complete

Biological Age

where people are relative to the number of years that they could possibly live -Ex: Smoker vs nonsmoker

Cohort

A group of people born at the same point or specific time span in historical time

What are some examples of cohort effects?

Can be specific, as in all people born in one particular year :baby boomer cohort - Each generation is exposed to different sets of historical and personal events -Ex: WWII, tablet computers, pr opportunities to attend college

Suppose we wanted to know whether the amount of time spent studying a grocery list such as the one that Sarah might create was related to how many items people remember at the store. To find out, the researcher would measure two things for each person in the study: the length of study time and the number of items purchased correctly. What type of design is this? List what happens when r=0, r>0, and r<0.

Correlational Design - r=0: The study time has no relation to remembering groceries - r>0: A study time increases (or decreases), the number of grocery items remembered also increases (or decreases). - r<0: When study time increases (or decreases), the number of groceries remembered increases (or decreases).

Mutlidiiectionailiy (lifespan perspective)

Development involves both growth and decline - as people grow in one area, they may lose in another at a different rates - ex: peoples vocal ability tends to increase throughout life, but reaction time slows down - Old age you decline in sensory and hearing, but older adults tend to control emotions better

Secondary Aging

Developmental changes that are related to disease, lifestyle, and other environmentally induced changes that are not inevitable. - the progressive loss of intellectual abilities in Alzheimer's disease and related forms of dementia

Cross- Sectional Design

Developmental differences are identified by testing people of different ages at the same time. - allow researchers to examine age differences but not age change

Cohort effects

Differences caused by experiences and circumstances unique to the generation to which one belongs. - correspond to history-graded influences

Historical Context (Lifespan perspective)

Each of us develops within a particular set of circumstances determined by the historical time in which we are born and the culture in which we grow up - Ex: Maraias experientes were shaped by living in the 20th century in a Chicano neighborhood in southwest

What particular variation of cross-sectional design is used the most?

Extreme age groups design

Chronological age is not the only shorthand index variable used in adult development and aging. What are the others?

Gender Ethnicity socioeconomic

Non- Normative influences

Parents being married for 20 years Having siblings

Naturalistic Observation

People are observed as they behave spontaneously in some real-life situation. - Life, real world settings - Example: Sitting in commons and watching people eat to see what they like

Ageism

a form of discrimination against older adults based on their age

Validity

Of a measure is the extent to which it measures what researches thinks it measures - A measure of memory is valid only if it can be shown to actually measure memory.

Sequential Design

Represents different combinations of cross-sectional or longitudinal studies. - Study a cohort over years, then 10 years later you start another cohort - powerful because we can look at individual differences - Allows us to compare 2 different cohorts - Comparisons across time

Representative sampling

Researchers usually are interested in a broad group of people called populations. Almost all studies include only a sample of people, which is a subset of of the population. Researchers mist be careful to ensure that their sample is truly the representation of the population of interest.

What are structured observations useful for?

Studying behaviors that are difficult to deserve naturally - Ex: Hoe people react to emergencies is hard to study naturally because emergencies generally are rare and unpredictable events

Emerging adulthood

period from late teens to mid 20s, a period when individuals are not adolesncts but are not fully adults

How is biological age assessed?

by measuring the functioning of the various vital, or life-limiting, organ systems, such as the cardiovascular system

Nature Nurture issue

degree to which genetic or hereditary (nature) and experimental or environmental (nurture) determine the kind of person you are

The number of older adults amount ________ ___________ _________ is increasing faster than amount European Americans.

ethnic minority groups

Because the key variable is systematically manipulated in an experiment, researchers can.....

infer cause-and-effect relations about the variable.

What 4 key features of the lifespan perspective did Paul Baltes identify?

1.) Multi directionality 2.) Plasticity 3.)Historical context 4.) Multiple Causation

What are the three concerns with Extreme age group design?

1.) Samples are not representative, so we must not read too much into the results 2.) Age should be treated as a continuous variable, not as a category. Viewing age asa continuous variable allows researchers to gain a better understanding of how age relates to any observed age differences 3.) They assume the measures used to mean the same thing across both are groups

Confounding

Any situation in which one cannot determine which of two or more effects is responsible for the behaviors being observed. example: a Research is confounded because one cannot know whether the behaviors observed occur because the participants are 40 years old or because of the specific life experiences had as a result of being born in a particular historical period.

The very large increases in the number of _______, _________, and ________ relative to European and African American Older adults.

Asian, Native, and Latino American

Why will future older adults be more educated?

Daily due to better educational opportunities for more students and a greater need for formal schooling (especially college) to find a good job. Also better educated people tend to live longer, mostly because they have higher incomes, which gives them better access to good healthcare and a chance to follow healthier lifestyles.

The lifespan perspective

Divides human development into two phases: - Early- childhood and adolescence - Later- young adulthood middle age and old age

Correlation Study

Investigators examine relations between variables as they exist naturally in the world. - A researcher measures two variables, and sees how they are they related.

Experimental designs

Involves manipulating a key factor that the researcher believes is responsible for a particular behavior and randomly assigning participants to the experimental and the control groups.

What leads to Ageism?

Myths about the elderly that lead to negative stereotypes of the elderly

What are the two types of Systematic Observation?

Naturalistic Observation Structured observations

Development is shaped by both:

Nature and Nurture, they are both mutually interactive forces

Primary aging

Normal disease free development during adulthood - Changes in biological, psychological, sociocultural, or lifestyle changes in primary development are an inevitable part of the developmental process - ex: menopause, decline in reaction time, and loss of family or friends

How is Validity established?

Often established by showing that the measure in question is closely related to another measure known to be valid.

What group of people represent individualism?

Older adults who are fiercely independent, who view the challenges of aging as something you face mainly alone or with help from professionals.

What group of people reflect collectivism?

Older adults who view themselves as a part of a larger unit, typically family, and seethe same challenges as something one faces with other family members in a group.

Micro genetic Study

Special type of longitudinal design, participants are tested repeatedly over a span of days or weeks, typically what they aim of observing change directly as it occurs.

Emerging adulthood is the time too....

explore careers, self identity, and commitment. But also a time when certain biological and psychological developmental trend peal, and brain development continues in different ways

Systematic Observation

involves watching people and carefully recording what they say or do.

Psychological age

refers to the fictional level of the psychological abilities people use to adapt to changing environmental demands - these abilities include: - memory - intelligence - motivation - other skills that foster and maintain self- esteem and personal control example: how young you feel/act

Sociocultural Age

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

Age effects

reflects differences caused by underlying process, such as biological, psychological, or sociocultural changes. - inherent changes within the person and are to caused by the passage of time per se. - Changes that occur as a product of growing older - The goal of most research is to examine age effects

In an experiment the researcher is most interested in identifying what?

the differences between the groups of people

Normative History

a war, economic downfalls, events that most people in a culture experience at the same time

biopsychosocial Framework

One useful way to organize the biological, psychological, and sociocultural forces on human development

What don't correlation studies give?

Definite information about the cause-and-effect relationships

Despite the cons of Cross-Sectional Designs, why does this design still dominate the research in gerontology?

- Because all the measurements are obtained at one time, so cross- sectional design can be conducted more quickly and inexpensively than research using other designs -

What are the weaknesses of cross-sectional design?

- Because people are tested only once in point in their development, we learn nothing about the continuity of development. - Also affected by cohort effects, meaning that differences between age groups (cohorts) may result as easily from environmental events from developmental processes - Cross sectional studies assume that when the older participants were younger, they resembled the people in the younger age group of the study

What are the 4 forces of development?

- Biological Development - genetic and health related - Psychological Forces- Perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and personality - Sociocultural forces- interpersonal, societal - Life cycle forces- how same event/combination of forces affect people in different points in their lives

Why is it an issue that there is a driven number of older adults , because of the baby boomers?

- Cost of entitlement programs that support older adults, such as Social Security and other pension systems as well as medicare, will become the largest expenditures in the federal states' budgets, facing intergenerational conflict over shrinking public resources. the cost for programs that support older adults will be borne by smaller groups of taxpayers i younger generations.

What are the guidelines of the codes of conduct that specify the rights of reach participants and procedures to protect these participants?

- Minimize risks to research patients - Describe the research to the potential participants so they can determine whether they wish to participate - Avoid deception; if participants must be derived, provide a thorough explanation of the true nature of the experiment as soon as possible. - results should be anonymous or confidential

What are some influences on developmental forces?

- Non-normative age - Normative history - Non-normative Influences

Aging is not a single process. What three distinct processes does it consist of?

- Primary Aging -Secondary aging - Tertiary aging

Dependent Variable

- The variable that may range in response to manipulations of the independent variable.

Every study of adult development and aging is built on 3 building blocks:

- age - cohort - time of measurement

Baltes identifies three sets of influences that interact to produce devleomental change over a lifespan:

- non-normative age-graded influences - normative-history graded influences - non normative influences

Correlations can range from ___ to___ reflecting three different types of relationships.

-1 to +1

What cannot be an independent variable?

Age, because we cannot manipulate it.

We cannot conduct true experiments to examine age on a particular person's behavior. But, what can we find about age?

Age-related effects of an independent variable on dependent variables

Meta- Analysis

Allows researchers to synthesize the results of many studies to estimate relations between variables. - Get a lot of research looking at similar methods, and see how all those findings generalize - determines whether a finding generalizes across many studies that use different methods

To find out whether Leah's or Sarah's approach to remembering works better, we could gather groups of older adults and try the following. We could Randomly assign the participants into three groups: those who are taught to use imagery, those who are taught to use lists, and those who are taught to use anything. After giving all the groups time to earn a new technique (where appropriate), we could test each group on a new grocery list to see what they remember. What Kind of design is this? List the independent and dependent variable.

Experimental degin Independent- instructions for how to study dependent- amount of information actually remembered

Non Normative age

Grated influences: biological, psychological, societal forces - ex: Getting your license at 16

Future older adults will be more educated. In 2010 A little more than half of the people over age 65 have a _________ ________ or some college, and only 25% will have a ________ _____.

Highschool diploma Bachelors Degree

Chronological Age

How many years have you lived -A shorthand way to index time and organize events and data by using a commonly understood time: Calendar time.

Multiple Causation (Lifespan perspective)

How people develop results from a wide variety of forces, which we consider later in this chapter. - Devleopmet is shaped by biological, psychological, sociocultural, and life-style forces

What was the goal of the nature- nurture aspect?

IT was to be able to say, for example, that intelligence was due to hereditary or that personality was out to experience.

Self- Reports

Peoples answers to questions about the topic of interest -When questions are posted in written form, the verbal report is a questionnaire; when the are posted verbally, it is an interview

What do correlation studies give?

Provide information about the strength of the relation between variables, which is reflected in the absolute value of the corelation coefficient.

It is possible to have a measure that is ______ but not ________, researchers must ensure that measures are both reliable and valid.

Reliable but not valid

Independent Variable

The key variable being manipulated

Structured Observations

The researcher creates a setting that is particularly likely to elicit the behavior of interest

Longitudinal Designs

The same individuals are observed or tested repeatedly at different points in their life. - Most direct way to watch growth occur - Allows us to identify age changes, because we are studying the same people over time - also allows use to look at individual change in memory - Con: time consuming

What are Micro Genetic studies useful for?

Tracking changes as a result of intervention

Case Study

When researches study one person in great detail. - useful when researchers want to study a specific phenomenon, such as uncommon diseases or people with extremely high ability

Gerontology

the study of aging from maturity through old age

In a correlation design, when r=0...

the two variables re unrelated

In a correlation design, when r<0....

the variables are are inversely related

In a correlation design, when r>0...

the variables are positively related

What does evidence indicate that providing a supportive environment for the people with Alzheimers disease can improve

their performance on cognitive tasks

The number of elderly people will increase ________ between 2010 and 2050., compared to a much smaller percentage increase in the number of 20-29 year olds during the same period.

threefold