Unit 3 Flashcards
(14 cards)
Describe two theoretical ideas about how middle-aged and older adults handle stereotypes of aging.
Labeling theory - Tendency to apply stereotype to self, more susceptible to stereotypes.
Resilience theory - Confronting negative stereotypes - leads to rejection of stereotypes, less susceptible.
What is stereotype threat? How does stereotype threat affect older people’s cognitions?
Stereotype threat is the fear/anxiety of confirming negative stereotypes about one’s age. This negatively affects older people’s cognition as they can perform worse on tasks regardless of their academic competence. This effect becomes worse as the stereotype becomes more salient.
Describe two aspects of emotional intelligence. How is emotional intelligence linked to cognitive intelligence (e.g., IQ)?
- Trait-like self-perceived dispositions and abilities
- Ability to process information about emotions and use appropriately.
IQ tests measure your ability to solve problems, use logic, and grasp or communicate complex ideas. EQ tests measure your ability to recognize emotion in yourself and others, and to use that awareness to guide your decisions.
Describe two age-related differences in impression formation. What do researchers suggest are behind these differences?
Positive to negative - elderly more willing to change
Negative to positive - elderly maintain more
Reason being - negativity bias. Negative information tend to make a bigger impact and holds greater value with elderly.
What is the correspondence bias? What age-related differences are there in this bias? What are some conditions that affect this difference?
The correspondence bias is the tendency to draw inferences about a person’s unique and enduring dispositions from behaviors that can be explained by the situations in which they occur.
Younger: Draw inferences about older adults’ dispositions from behavior that can be explained by situation.
Older: Tend to draw different inferences. Learned from life experience to consider both dispositional and situational information.
Culture:
Chinese less prone to correspondence bias than Americans
Relationship situation:
Older tend to blame primary character (dispositional)
What is the positivity effect? How does it relate to SOC models?
Positivity effect is avoiding negative information and focusing on positive information when making decision or remembering events. Focus is on the emotional meaning and maintaining positive feelings.
A growing number of studies suggest older adults avoid negative information & focus more on positive information when making decisions & judgements & when remembering events, this phenomenon is called the positivity effect.
Older adults remember positive images more than negative whereas younger adults remember both positive and negative images equally as well. Older adults allocate less attention to negative stimuli and remember more positive information when recalling own autobiographical information.
To connect this to SOC with age there’s a reduction in resources so older people select situation to focus their resources on that is in concordance with their goals (good health, high well-being) such as feeling positive, so they optimize potentiation of these gains to focus more on positive information than negative information to keep these positive feelings and compensate for losses by for example ignore the negative information.
SOC (selection, optimization and compensation), model says that these three fundamental processes of developmental regulation are essential for successful development and aging. They are thought to advance the maximization of gains and minimization of losses associated with aging. Basic assumptions underlying SOC model is – life-span psychology holds that development comprises developmental trajectories of growth (ex: language) and decline (ex: decline in health in old age). A person’s internal & external resources are at each point in life finite (set). Resources can be defining as personal or environmental characteristics that support a person’s interaction with his or her environment. There are age-related changes that occur in the availability & efficiency of resources. There’s a reduction in resources with age because (1) advantages of evolutionary selection decline across life span (2) the need for culture increases across life span (3) the efficacy of culture decreases across life span.
According to SOC model, successful aging encompasses selection of functional domains on which to focus one’s resources, optimizing developmental potentiation gains and compensating for losses.
What is personal control? What are two broad ways that people view personal control?
Personal control - degree to which people believe their performance is affected solely but what they do. Entity (innate) vs Skill (learned).
Personal control is to which degree people believe their performance is affected by what that person does. If you have high personal control you believe your performance is up to you but if you believe you have low personal control, your performance is under influences other than your own.
People either view personal control to be entity (born with) or skill (learned), whereas entity refers to innate and skill is learned.
Describe one of the two theoretical ideas about maintaining personal control when aging.
Hechhausen is one theoretical idea about maintaining personal control, it contains two different control strategies.
You change the environment or you change yourself.
Primary strategies involve brining the environment in line with one’s desire & goals. For example, if you lost your job a primary strategy would be to entail an active search for another job to have a stable income again.
Secondary strategies involve bringing oneself in line with the environment, making changes within the self. For example, appraising the situation in terms of how you really did not enjoy that particular job.
What is collaborative cognition? Why is it considered an example of SOC?
Collaborative cognition occurs when two or more people work together to solve a cognitive task. This enhances adult’s performance on a variety of memory and problem-solving tasks, serving an important adaptive function. An example for when this happens is when couples help each other with story recall. On recall tasks a married couple using cognitive style together minimizes their working memory demands and can perform as well as younger couples on the recall task.
Collaborative cognition can therefore range from two people to an entire society (Sweden remembering the attack in Stockholm).
Collaborative cognition means that two people or larger social units can compensate for declines in cognition. For example, in cohabitation, one partner is better at remembering what needs to be bought at the store, the other remembers events that has happened more clearly. So, they compensate for each other, one buys in the store and the other tells stories to their grandchildren.
Collaborative cognition occurs when two or more people work together to solve a cognitive task. This can occur from two people to entire societies, for example when societies remember 9/11. Collaborative cognition enhances adult’s performance on a variety of memory and problem-solving tasks, serving as an important adaptive function. This is used when married couples story tell and help each other with story recall and fill in what the other one misses.
In research on recall tasks, old married couples using a cognitive style together minimizes their working memory demands which lead to them performing as well on the recall task as younger couples. In this situation they compensate for having decreased working memory abilities such as less storing capacity, less ability to allocate capacity to more than one task and slower rates of processing by using collaborative cognition.
SOC (selection, optimization & compensation)– because in collaborative cognition you optimize your resources of being for example to people and compensate for not having the same amount at resources as one person by using both cognition.
Compensate for our declines, optimizes the ability & forming stronger relationships.
Describe the three crises of adulthood according to Erikson. Evaluate the evidence examining these crises.
In early adulthood the crisis is intimacy verses isolation, in middle adulthood the crisis is generativity verses stagnation and in late adulthood it is ego integrity verses ego despair.
The major developmental task in early adulthood is achieving intimacy versus isolation, it involves establishing a intimate relationship with another. Intimacy is sharing all aspects of yourself without fearing the loss of identity. If intimacy is not achieved, isolation results. The psychological strength that emerges from the intimacy-isolation struggle is love.
Researchers state that women’s’ relationship are more intimate than men & intimacy is still associated with femininity, for boys it’s negative to be associated with female behavior. Boys still have close relationships but when measuring intimacy it is missed. Evidence have shown also that intimacy is something that emerges before adulthood.
In middle age the focus shift from intimacy to concern for the next generation, expressed as generativity versus stagnation. The struggle occurs between a sense of generativity (the feeling people must maintain & perpetuate society). Generativity is seen in things as parenthood as teaching. If the challenge of generativity is accepted, the development of trust in the next generation is facilitated and the psychosocial strength of care is obtained.
In older age, individuals must resolve struggle between ego integrity and despair. This stage begins with a growing awareness of near of death. To achieve integrity a person must come to terms with the choices & events that made his or her life unique. Also acceptance of the fact one’s life is close to an end.
Evidence for intimacy crisis: emerges earlier, sullican – chumships of late childhood, furman – rooted in attachment relationships & emerges in adolescence. Gender issues in defining intimacy.
Evidence for generativity: some support, elaboration on manifestations, may be more important for women, generativity is associated with satisfaction in life & work with emotional well-being, continues after middle-age
Evidence for ego integrity: reminiscence, is not necessary for integrity, may be unhealthy for some (ruminative), seen more in younger than middle or older adults, is generally positive for elders
What is the “midlife crisis”? Provide three findings from research that suggest this idea is false.
The midlife crisis is an idea that middle-aged adults experience a personal crisis that results in major changes in how they view themselves. Difficult issues such as one’s own mortality and inevitable aging are supposed to be faced. For example, middle-aged male running off with a much younger female as a result of his midlife crisis.
During a midlife crisis, people are supposed to take a good hard look at themselves & they hope, attain a much better understanding of who they are. Behavioral changes are supposed to occur.
Research have had a hard time at finding evidence of a universality of a particularly difficult time in midlife. Those who actually experience a crisis may be suffering from general problems of psychopathology.
Data suggest midlife is no more or no less traumatic for most people than any other period in life.
Most convincing support for this is research by Farrell and Rosenberg,
There is evidence that people engage in self-reflection, labouvie offer evidence for a reorganization of self & values across the adult life span. They suggest major dynamic that drives such changes may not be age dependent but rather general cognitive changes.
Individuals in middle adulthood show most complex understanding of self, emotions and motivations. Cognitive complexity also is shown to be the strongest predictor of higher levels of complexity in general. A midlife crisis may be the result of general gains in cognitive complexity from early to middle adulthood.
Stewart found women who have regrets about adopting traditional roles (wife/mother) but later pursue an education or career at midlife report higher well-being than either women who experience regret but don’t make a change or women who never experienced regrets about their roles. But such an adjustment may be more appropriately considered a midlife correction.
What are possible selves? Are there age-differences in possible selves?
Possible selves represent what we could become, what we would like to become (hoped-for selves) and what we are afraid of becoming (feared for selves).
Age-differences: hoped-for selves among young adults were family concerns listed as most important. Adults in their 30 listed family concerns as last whereas main issue was personal concern. 40-59-year old’s listed family issues again at top and occupation. Adults over 60 listed personal issues as most prominent.(?????????????)
Young adults have multiple possible selves and believe they can become the hoped-for self and avoid the feared self. Old adults’ number of selves and strength of belief is decreased. They believe neither hoped-for nor feared for self is under their personal control. There’s an age difference in personal motivation, belief in personal control and the need to explore new options.
Possible selves can be both hoped for possible selves and feared possible selves. Yes, there are some age-differences, younger tend to have greater number of possible selves, are more capable of avoiding feared possible selves and attain hoped for possible selves. While older are less likely to believe that attaining their hoped for possible self is under personal control.
Describe the “plaster hypothesis” according to Costa and McCrae. Using the Big 5 as the definition of personality, evaluate the evidence of Costa and McCrae’s claims.
According to Costa and McCrae the plaster hypothesis can be divided into the hard and soft hypothesis. The hard plaster hypothesis says that personality differences are set at age 30 and that no change occurs after age 30. The soft plaster hypothesis says that personality differences change after 30 but to less extent than before 30. When talking about change there are different changes,
What other types of change in the Big 5 personality traits (other than described by C & M) are seen across adulthood?
Mean-level change, individual level change & rank-order change
