Notes on "Aging and Loss" (08/24/2021 08:40)
In the United States, Asian Americans live the longest while African Americans live the shortest. Factors improving
life expectancy include:
 family history of longevity (i.e., genetics)
 physical activity
 employment
 advanced education
 social support
Factors improving emotional vitality include:
 adequate emotional support
 higher income
 better cognition
 many face-to-face contacts
 lack of vision problems
Memory changes caused by aging include:
 decreased ability to acquire new memories, lower processing speed, and declining working memory
 past events are remembered with greater precision than recent events
 semantic knowledge (e.g., vocabulary) may improve with age
Biological changes responsible for aging include:
 OXIDATIVE STRESS: damage to DNA, proteins, lipids, and cell death due to reactive free radicals
 damage to mitochondrial DNA due to free radicals, which impairs the mitochondrial respiratory system,
leading to physiological and metabolic defects
 telomere shortening, leading to CELLULAR SENESCENCE (a state in which cells no longer divide)
 apoptosis
Patterns of GRIEF (the psychobiological response to loss; BEREAVEMENT is the grief response to death):
 1.) ANTICIPATORY GRIEF: grief due to the expectation that a loved one may soon die because of a
serious illness; this may occur years before the actual death
 2.) DELAYED GRIEF: due to outside factors, e.g., families of missing people will continue to search for
them and do not know when to start grieving; family members may focus on seeking legal retribution for
the death and forget to grief the lost family member
 3.) CHRONIC/UNRESOLVED GRIEF: grief that persists longer than the cultural norm (i.e., 1-2 years);
those with unresolved grief never make actual progression towards resolving the grief
KUBLER-ROSS STAGES OF DYING:
 1.) DENIAL: refusal to believe the news
 2.) ANGER: patient becomes angry at the physician
 3.) BARGAINING: trying to bargain with the doctor (e.g., asking if dietary changes will cause your cancer
to respond to treatment) or with a deity
 4.) DEPRESSION: preoccupation with death, hopelessness, and emotional detachment
 5.) ACCEPTANCE: patient accepts his fate
PECK'S STAGES ON DEVELOPMENT OF LATE LIFE:
 DIFFERENTIATION vs. ROLE PREOCCUPATION: broad sense of self-definition vs. preoccupation
with a role (e.g., using retirement as the ability to form new meaningful relationships)
 BODY TRANSCENDENCE vs. BODY PREOCCUPATION: having social and mental sources of
pleasure transcend physical discomfort (e.g., coping with one's declining physical well-being by adjusting
the pace of activities)
 EGO TRANSCENDENCE vs. EGO PREOCCUPATION: accepting how one has lived one's life, rather
than being daunted by the prospect of death (e.g., accepting death as inevitable)