Chapter Summary Questions Flashcards
(217 cards)
What is gerontology? How does ageism relate to stereotypes of aging?
Gerontology is the study of aging from maturity through old age, as well as the study of older adults as a special group.
Myths of aging lead to negative stereotypes of older people, which can result in ageism, a form of discrimination against older people simply because of their age.
What is the life-span perspective?
The life-span perspective divides human development into two phases: an early phase (childhood and adolescence) and a later phase (young adult- hood, middle age, and old age).
There are four key features of the life-span perspective: multidirectionality, plasticity, historical context, and multiple causation.
What are the characteristics of the older adult population?
The number of older adults in the United States and other industrialized countries is increasing rapidly because of better health care, including declines in mortality during childbirth. The large numbers of older adults have important implications for human services.
The number of older Latino, Asian American, and Native American adults will increase much faster between now and 2050 than will the number of European American and African American older adults.
Whether older adults reflect individualism or collectivism has implications for interventions.
The increase in numbers of older adults is most rapid in developing countries
What four main forces shape development?
Development is shaped by four forces.
(1) Biological forces include all genetic and health-related factors.
(2) Psychological forces include all internal perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and personality factors.
(3) Sociocultural forces include interpersonal, societal, cultural, and ethnic factors
(4) Life-cycle forces reflect differences in how the same event or combination of biological, psychological, and sociocultural forces affects people at different points in their lives.
What are normative age-graded influences, normative history-graded influences, and nonnormative influences
Normative age-graded influences are life experiences that are highly related to chronological age. Normative history-graded influences are events that most people in a specific culture experience at the same time. Nonnormative influences are events that may be important for a specific individual but are not experienced by most people
How do culture and ethnicity influence aging?
Culture and ethnicity jointly provide status, social settings, living conditions, and personal experiences for people of all ages. Culture can be defined as shared basic value orientations, norms, beliefs, and customary habits and ways of living, and it provides the basic worldview of a society. Ethnicity is an individual and collective sense of identity based on historical and cultural group membership and related behaviors and belief
What is the meaning of age, Three types of aging are distinguished.
(1) Primary aging is normal, disease-free development during adulthood.
(2) Secondary aging is developmental changes that are related to disease.
(3) Tertiary aging is the rapid losses that occur shortly before death
Chronological age is
is a poor descriptor of time- dependent processes and serves only as a shorthand for the passage of calendar time. Time-dependent processes do not actually cause behavior.
Perceived age is
is the age you think of yourself as being.
Biological age is
where a person is relative to the maximum number of years he or she could live
Psychological age is
where a person is in terms of the abilities people use to adapt to changing environmental demands
Sociocultural age is
where a person is in terms of the specific set of roles adopted in relation to other members of the society and culture
What are the nature–nurture, stability–change, continuity–discontinuity, and the “universal versus context-specific development” issues?
The nature–nurture issue concerns the extent to which inborn, hereditary characteristics (nature) and experiential, or environmental, influences (nurture) determine who we are. The focus on nature and nurture must be on how they interact.
The stability–change issue concerns the degree to which people remain the same over time.
The continuity–discontinuity issue concerns competing views of how to describe change: as a smooth progression over time (continuity) or as a series of abrupt shifts (discontinuity).
The issue of universal versus context-specific development concerns whether there is only one pathway of development or several. This issue becomes especially important in interpreting cultural and ethnic group differences.
What approaches do scientists use to measure behavior in adult development and aging research
Measures used in research must be reliable (measure things consistently) and valid (measure what they are supposed to measure).
Systematic observation involves watching people and carefully recording what they say or do. Two forms are common: naturalistic observation (observing people behaving spontaneously in a real-world setting) and structured observations (creating a setting that will elicit the behavior of interest).
If behaviors are hard to observe directly, researchers often create tasks that sample the behavior of interest.
Self-reports involve people’s answers to questions presented in a questionnaire or interview about a topic of interest.
Most research on adults has focused on middle- class, well-educated European Americans. This creates serious problems for understanding the development experiences of other groups of people.
What are the general designs for doing research?
Experiments consist of manipulating one or more independent variables, measuring one or more dependent variables, and randomly assigning participants to the experimental and control groups. Experiments provide information about cause and effect.
Correlational designs address relations between variables; they do not provide information about cause and effect but do provide information about the strength of the relation between the variables.
Case studies are systematic investigations of individual people that provide detailed descriptions of people’s behavior in everyday situations.
- What specific designs are unique to adult development and aging research?
Age effects - reflect underlying biological, psychological, and sociocultural changes. Cohort effects are differences caused by experiences and circumstances unique to the generation to which one belongs. Time-of-measurement effects reflect influences of the specific historical time when one is obtaining information. Developmental research designs represent various combinations of age, cohort, and time-of-measurement effects. Confounding is any situation in which one cannot determine which of two or more effects is responsible for the behaviors being observed.
Cross-sectional designs - examine multiple cohorts and age groups at a single point in time. They can identify only age differences and confound age and cohort. The use of extreme age groups (young and older adults) is problematic in that the samples may not be representative, age should be treated as a continuous variable, and the measures may not be equivalent across age groups.
Longitudinal designs - examine one cohort over two or more times of measurement. They can identify age change but have several problems, including practice effects, dropout, and selective survival. Longitudinal designs confound age and time of measurement. Microgenetic studies are short-term longitudinal designs that measure behaviors very closely over relatively brief periods of time.
Sequential designs - involve more than one cross-sectional (cross-sequential) or longitudinal (longitudinal sequential) design. Although they are complex and expensive, they are important because they help disentangle age, cohort, and time-of-measurement effects.
Meta-analyses examine the consistency of findings across many research studies.
What ethical procedures must researchers follow?
Investigators must obtain informed consent from their participants before conducting research.
What brain imaging techniques are used in neuroscience research?
Structural neuroimaging such as computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provide highly detailed images of anatomical features in the brain.
Functional neuroimaging such as single pho- ton emission computerized tomography (SPECT), positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), magnetoencephalography, and near infrared spectroscopic imaging (NIRSI) provide an indication of brain activity but not high anatomical detail.
What are the main research methods used and issues studied in neuroscience research in adult development and aging?
The neuropsychological approach compares brain- related psychological functioning of healthy older adults with adults displaying pathological disorders in the brain.
The neuro-correlational approach links measures of behavioral performance to measures of neural structure or functioning.
The activation imaging approach directly links functional brain activity with behavioral data.
How is the brain organized structurally?
The brain consists of neurons, which are comprised of dendrites, axon, neurofibers, and terminal branches. Neurons communicate across the space between neurons called the synapse via chemicals called neurotransmitters.
Important structures in the brain for adult development and aging include the cerebral cortex, corpus callosum, prefrontal and frontal cortex, cerebellum, hippocampus, limbic system, and amygdala.
What are the basic changes in neurons as we age?
Structural changes in the neuron include declines in number, decreases in size and number of dendrites, the development of tangles in neurofibers, and increases in deposits of certain proteins.
What changes occur in neurotransmitters with age?
Important declines occur in the dopaminergic system (neurons that use dopamine) that are related to declines in memory, among others.
Age-related changes in serotonin affect memory, mood, appetite, and sleep.
Age-related changes in acetylcholine are related to arousal, sensory perception, and sustained attention
What changes occur in brain structures with age?
White matter (neurons covered by myelin) becomes thinner and shrinks, and does not function as well with age. White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are related to neural atrophy. Many areas of the brain show significant shrinkage with age.
What do age-related structural brain changes mean for behavior?
Structural changes in the prefrontal cortex with age cause significant declines in executive functioning.
Age-related structural changes in the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus cause declines in memory function.
Older and younger adults process emotional mate- rial differently. Older adults show more activity in more areas of the prefrontal cortex.
Brain structures involved in automatic processing (e.g., amygdala) show less change with age, whereas brain structures involved in more reflective processing (e.g., prefrontal cortex) show more change with age.
The positivity effect refers to the fact that older adults are more motivated to derive emotional meaning from life and to maintain positive feelings. Older adults activate more brain structures when processing emotionally positive material.