Adulthood and Aging
Module 6
Facts and Falsehood?
 The timing of social events—such as getting a driver’s license,
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marriage, and having children– remains relatively consistent across
different cultures.
Menopause creates significant psychological problems for women.
People who live to age 80 have brains that weight 5 percent less
than their brains did when they were teenagers.
Elderly people can do just as god on a multiple-choice test as
people in their 40s.
The ability to remember facts increases with age.
The “empty nest” phenomenon brings about more happiness than
sadness.
Men are 5 times more likely to suffer through the death of a
spouse than a women.
Periods of Adulthood
Period
Approximate Age Brackets
 Early Adulthood
 20-35
 Middle Adulthood
 36-64
 Late Adulthood
 65 and over
Early Adulthood
Early Adulthood
 Social Clock: the culturally preferred timing of social
events such as marriage, parenthood, and retirement.
 Emerging Adulthood
Physical Changes
Early Adulthood
 Performance Peaks
 Reaction time
 Sensory awareness
 Cardiac output
 Most of they physical abilities will top out sometime during
your twenties
Middle Adulthood
 How do different cultures welcome the outward signs of
getting older?
 Menopause: the time of natural cessation of menstruation,
also refers to the biological changes a woman experiences as
her ability to reproduce declines.
 45-55 years of age
 Does not make most women depressed or irrational
 Women are no more or no less depressed than women who are
not experiencing this change.
Latter Adulthood
 Our sight, smell, and hearing usually begin a steep decline once we hit
age 65
 The corneas and lenses become less transparent, letting in only about 30
percent of the light that enters our eyes.
 Muscles strength and stamina also diminish
 Bodies take longer to heal after injury
 Slows down travel on the neural path
 Portions of the brain start to atrophy, or waste away
 If you live to be 80, your brain will weigh 5 percent less than it does now
 Remaining physically and mentally active will compensate for lost brain
cells and neural connections
 Exercise appears to foster brain cell development while helping prevent
heart disease and obesity.
Diseases Related to Aging
 Alzheimer’s disease: A progressive and irreversible brain
disorder characterized by gradual deterioration or memory,
reasoning, language, and finally, physical functioning.
 3% of the worlds population develops by age 75
 Senile Dementia: the mental disintegration that accompanies
alcoholism, tumor, stroke, aging, and most often, Alzheimer’s
disease.
Cognitive Changes
“Can’t teach an old dog new tricks” or “Never too
late to learn”
Memory
 Younger adults have better recall
 Recognition remains stable from 20 to 60
 Older people maintain the ability to remember meaningful
materials, while losing the skills necessary to remember
meaningless information
 Habitual tasks and time-oriented tasks are also more
challenging for older adults
Memory
Intelligence
 Fluid Intelligence: one’s ability to reason speedily and
abstractly
 tends to decrease during late adulthood.
 Crystallized Intelligence: one’s accumulated knowledge and
verbal skills
 tend to increase with age.
Novelists, historians, and philosophers tend to produce there
best work in their forties, fifties, and sixties and later,
whereas mathematicians and scientists often do their most
creative work in their twenties and thirties.
Intelligence
Social Changes
Life’s Commitments
Sigmund Freud said it best, when he wrote that the
healthy adult is one who can work and love.
Work
 Most first- or second-year college students
 Change their initial major field of study
 Cannot accurately predict the careers they will have later in life
 Change careers after entering the work force
 Post-college employment is often unrelated to college major
 Work that is challenging, provides a sense of
accomplishment, and fits your interests is most like to hit the
happiness target
Love
 Commitment, devotion, intimacy, attachment
 Vital to a happy adulthood
 Love last longer and is most satisfying when marked by
 Intimate self-disclosure
 Shared emotional and material support
 Similar interests and values
Love
 Ninety percent of our population gets married at least once
 Critical ingredient to marriage is mutual respect
 Respect: View others as important people , paying attention to them and seeing
their ideas, abilities, needs, and wants as meaningful and worthwhile.
 Marriage most likely to last if
 Both members are over 20
 Have a stable income from good employment
 Dated a long time before getting married
 Are well educated
 Divorce rate in the U.S. is around 50 %
 Three out of four who divorce will marry a second time
 The divorce rate for hose who lived together prior to marriage is higher than
for coupes who did not live together.
 Marriages last when each partner compliments, hugs, and smiles five times
more than he or she insults or criticizes.
Love
 Raising a child requires a serious investment of time, money,
and emotion, which can exact a heavy toll on a couple’s
satisfaction with each other.
 Parents who make the effort to spread the work load more
evenly can anticipate a double reward:
 A more satisfying and successful marriage
 Better parent-child relationships with both parents
“empty nest”
 The empty-nest phenomenon brings more happiness than
sadness.
Late Adulthood
 Gerontology: the branch of psychology that studies the
aging process and the problems of older people.
Dying and Death
 Thanatology: the study of death and the methods of coping
with it.
 One spouse out lives the other, a grief suffered 5 times more
often by women than by men.
 Reactions to death vary from culture to culture
 There is no evidence to support the idea that we progress
through predictable stages.
 Anger, denial, acceptance
 Some grieve briefly while others grieve for months or years