What effect does aging have on creativity,
wisdom, and intelligence? Creativity has no
clear association with aging. Although some
great scientists and artists have made their most
significant contributions when they were in their
20s, others have made creative contributions
when they were in their 60s, 70s, or even older.
Wisdom is a difficult concept to measure. Since
it involves a profound understanding of the
world, it is likely to increase with age.
Psychologists describe two types of intelligence:
fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence.
Fluid intelligence involves reasoning,
memory, and information-processing skills.
Crystallized intelligence refers to the information,
skills, and strategies learned through experience.
Although some older people experience a
slight loss of fluid intelligence, aging appears to
have no effect on crystallized intelligence.
How does aging change a person's ability
to learn and remember? Learning is the
process of acquiring knowledge and skills. Studies
of eye blink classical conditioning show that
learning ability slows down as people grow
older. Memory is the retention or storage of
knowledge. Memory includes both short-term
memory, quickly committing a phone number
to memory, for instance, in order to dial it, and
long-term memory, which is the storehouse of
past experience. Short-term memory is more
dramatically affected by age than long-term
memory.
What mental disorders are more common
among the aged than among the young?
Dementias are mental disorders that affect
memory, cognitive functioning, and personality.
One common form of dementia that is most
likely to occur in old age is Alzheimer's disease.
Symptoms of Alzheimer's disease include memory
loss, personality change, and loss of control
of bodily functions. Older people are also more
prone to strokes than younger people. A stroke
can damage speech and language centers in the
brain, causing aphasia, which means a language
deficit. A person with aphasia may be
unable to produce meaningful speech and be
unable to understand written or spoken language.
More than half of all stroke patients develop
vascular dementia, which impairs brain
functioning.
Parkinson's disease is a chronic brain disorder
that becomes more common in old age.
Symptoms include a slowing of movement, a
stooped posture, a shuffling gait, and slurred
speech. The drug L-dopa can control some of
the symptoms but it does not cure the disease.
Clinical depression is more common among
young people, but the elderly are more likely
to exhibit depressive symptoms. Depression
in old age is linked to stressors such as the
loss of a loved one, chronic illness, or financial
problems.
How does a person's personality affect his
or her ability to cope with changes that
come with age? Personality influences the way
an individual adapts to the changes associated
with normal aging. Personality traits are relatively
enduring dispositions toward thoughts,
feelings, and behavior. The most unchanging
component of personality is temperament, an
individual's characteristic style of reacting to
people and situations. Although personality
tends to be stable, gender differences that are
quite distinct among young people tend to disappear
as people grow older.
What stages of development do adults go
through, and how do older men and
women differ in their development? One of
the first theories of adult development was proposed
by the psychologist Erik Erikson. Erikson
suggested that there were eight stages of ego development,
beginning with infancy and ending
with old age. Each stage has its own developmental
tasks and its own competing tensions. In
middle age people enter the seventh stage, in
which the opposing possibilities are generativity
and stagnation. The major task is to establish
and guide the next generation. In old age, the
eighth and final stage of life, the opposing tensions
are between ego integrity and despair. The
central task is to integrate the painful conditions
of old age into a new form of psychosocial
strength.
Psychologist Daniel Levinson studied men and
women in midlife to learn if there was an underlying
order to adult development. He discovered that
people did pass through a series of developmental
stages that could be divided into a sequence of
eras, each with a distinctive bio-psychosocial character
and each with explicit developmental tasks.
Psychologist Terry Apter conducted research
on middle-aged women and found four types—traditional, innovative, expansive, and protestors.
Each type approached midlife with a distinct orientation,
and each resolved the crisis of midlife by
defining a new self.
