ageing Flashcards
what is the importance of ageing? what are age related issues?
-People over age of 50 are the fastest growing age group in uk
-more people (50+) will have more chronic issues increasing medical staff demand
- not many people pay tax
age related issues:
-health
-income (high income suggest increased longevity, in old people, income falls - 18000 pension-money that government pays you after retirement, which is lower than normal salary)
-social status (decrease due to no work)
-working (decreases)
what are the changes seen in older people? and what are they likely to pursue as they ages? What is recommended to maximise an older person’s life and health?
-cognitive decline (loss of brain weight, decrease in brain cells/cell number): speed of processing is specifically affected rather than actual cognitive skills such as problem solving. IQ declines slightly and remains constant, but if pathological disease occurs, there will be significant decline
-physical system declines
-This decline remains constant till death
psychological decline
as one ages, there is a shift away from gaining knowledge, and more towards emotional satisfaction
Give older people autonomy (the freedom to choose what they want) to help increase longevity and emotional satisfaction).
what’s the difference between normal and abnormal ageing?
abnormal
- early onset of ageing-related issues
- loss of wisdom (fluid intelligence declines greatly compared to crystallised intelligence)
- significant cognitive decline rather than slight
what is the positive illusions and what is depressive realism
Positive illusions work: underestimate bad things and overestimate the good things that will happen. We think bad things won’t happen to us. When it does happen – we lose positive illusion and then is returns
Depressive realism:
If you ask depressive people how likely that something bad will happen, they will say it is more common and more accurate
what happens to personality as we age?
As we age, our personalities change in the sense that we become less worried and more comfortable being outside of social norms.
How personality changes as we age:
-openness: tends to decrease with age (younger adults are more open to new experiences and curious. As you age, you become less interested in seeking new experiences)
-agreeableness: increases with age (showing more kindness, cooperation, and warmth. Maintain positive relationships)
-neuroticism: decreases with age (older adults often report fewer negative emotions, due to better emotional regulation and perspective on life’s up and downs.)
-Conscientiousness: increases with age (more organised, reliable, responsible as they age. Can be due to accumulated life experiences that reinforce and aid planning, and hard work)
-extraversion: mixed findings, but shows slight decrease or remains stable (if you were always and introvert sat an introvert and vice versa, with slight shift to introversion)
How does personality effect health and longevity?
Being disagreeable predicts poor health particularly cardiovascular health (therefore be more chilled to live longer
as well as neuroticism
opposite to this: Agreeable character will help other more, research shows this attribute maximises benefits in your function and the other persons function too
what is repressive coping and what has research found about this? (Erskine research)
Repressive copers is when people who have a tendency to avoid negative and personally threatening information. In younger people they make up about 15% of the population.
What’s interesting is that they don’t know they are doing it. It’s completely automatic/ unconscious. For example, if a bear was running at them, they unconsciously are unaware of the potentially threatening stimulus and this is disadvantageous, and through evolution, it shows they’re least likely to survive. But they are all psychologically health with absence of any mental health condition, and that’s because they never notice anything negative in the world.
As you age, repressive coping increases. Over 65, about 50% of them are repressive copers. A tendency to avoid negative information increases as you age can be useful to maximise happiness and less stress, and even is psychoprotective/ preserve mental health. But it does have its downside, as you have lower survival, less mindful of details therefore not observant and won’t be able to make good decisions. And would be better to know the truth and be depressed then be happily ignorant
what do older adults demonstrate less of compared to younger people
He compared a certain population based on these.
Al the older adults displayed reduced anxiety, neuroticism, depression, unhappiness, rumination (overthinking) and thought suppression. Whereas younger adults were likely to show greater psychiatric problems.
They found that the older adults were much healthier than the younger adults. And that a massive proportion of them were repressive copers. If you divided the older adults into non repressive and repressive copers. It was only the repressive copers who were healthier
why do some have repressive coping and some do not and what are some of the implications of this?
To become a repressive coper, a major life trauma may trigger this mechanism. But this doesn’t happen to everyone. (It seems that this happens to people who have had significant trauma in their lives. A reason for this could be that the brain kicks a homeostatic process that preserves an individual’s happiness, avoiding negative and threating information.
So, the problem with repressive copers is that it is associated with physical problems. So not processing negative stimuli compromises physical health
He then followed them up 10 years later. A lot of them had died, but he managed to get around 60% of them. He found that repressive coping had risen to 50%. So, it seems to rise overtime. This is because as you age the more life experiences accumulated so more trauma you’ll have and loss of motivation, so it works as a positive mechanism to increase quality of life as you approach the later stages of life.
While physical health declines with age, mental health often improves.
This is problematic because there’s no real mechanism to explain that other than how you change your goals as a result of aging and stuff about repressive ageing. The reason for repression coping could be a biological determination but not yet understoo
