Middle adulthood Flashcards
According to Jung, midlife is the afternoon of life and it serves as an important preparation for late adulthood,
“the evening of life”.
Today, the percentages of people at different ages in the life span are more similar, creating what is called the “___________” of the age distribution (a vertical rectangle).
rectangularization
the developmental period that begins at approximately 40 to 45 years of age and extends to about 60 to 65 years of age
Middle Adulthood
It is the age period in which gains (growth) and losses (decline) as well as biological and sociocultural factors balance each other
Middle Adulthood
A ______ period because it is a time of
balancing growth and decline, linking earlier and later periods of development, and connecting younger and older generations
pivotal
The most visible signs of physical changes in middle adulthood involve _______.
physical appearance
Visible signs in physical appearance are:
wrinkles
hair becomes thin and gray
distraction of nails
age-related loss of muscle mass and strength.
Sacropenia
-the ability to focus and maintain an image on the retina-experiences its sharpest decline between 40 and 59 years of age
Accommodation of the eye
a condition characterized by hypertension, obesity, and insulin resistance.
Metabolic Syndrome
disorders that are characterized by slow onset and long duration. They are rare in early adulthood, increase during middle adulthood, and become common in late adulthood.
Chronic disorder
stress hormones; the link between stress and disease. Elevated _ levels are linked to physical health problems.
Cortisol
Having a sense of ______ in middle age is one of the most important modifiable factors in delaying the onset of diseases in middle adulthood and reducing the frequency of diseases in late adulthood.
Control
main causes of death for individuals in middle adulthood.
Chronic Diseases
the midlife transition during which fertility declines (both men and women).
Climacteric
cessation of a woman’s menstrual periods, usually during the late forties or early fifties.
Menopause
a girl’s first menstruation
Menarche
the transitional period from normal menstrual periods to no menstrual periods at all.
~usually occurs during the forties but can occur in the thirties.
Perimenopause
a condition in which the body does not produce enough testosterone.
Male Hypogonadism
the inability to adequately achieve and maintain an erection to attain satisfactory sexual performance.
Erectile Dysfunction (ED)
accumulated information and verbal skills, which increase in middle adulthood.
Crystallized Intelligence
the ability to reason abstractly, which begins to decline from middle adulthood onward
Fluid Intelligence
If we find differences between 40- and 60-
year-olds on intelligence tests when they are assessed ___________, these differences might be due to cohort effects related to educational differences rather than to age.
cross-sectionally
It involves extensive evaluation of intellectual abilities during adulthood was initiated by K. Warner Schaei.
The Seattle longitudinal study
The main mental abilities tested in this study are:
Verbal comprehension
Verbal memory
Numeric facility
Spatial orientation
Inductive reasoning
Perceptual speed
ability to understand ideas expressed in words.
Verbal Comprehension
ability to encode and recall meaningful language units, such as a list of words.
Verbal Memory
ability to perform simple mathematical computations such as addition, subtraction, and multiplication.
Numeric Facility
ability to visualize and mentally rotate stimuli in two- and three-dimensional space
Spatial Orientation
ability to recognize and understand patterns and relationships in a problem and to use this understanding to solve other instances of the problem.
Inductive Reasoning
ability to quickly and accurately make simple discriminations in visual stimuli.
Perceptual Speed
middle age was a time of peak performance for some aspects of both crystallized intelligence (_____) and fluid intelligence (________).
verbal ability & spatial orientation and inductive reasoning
Perceptual speed begins declining in early adulthood and continues to decline in middle adulthood.
→ A current interest focuses on possible causes for the decline in speed of processing information in adults.
Speed of information processing
Speed of memory processing occur at different levels of analysis, such as:
Cognitive
Neuroanatomical
Neurochemical
maintaining goals, switching between tasks, or preserving internal representations despite distraction
Cognitive
- changes in specific brain regions, such as the prefrontal cortex
Neuroanatomical