Setting the Context

The median age of the population is rising due to declining fertility, longer life expectancies, and, of course, the baby boom. While ageism (negative stereotypes about the elderly) is universal, we also gravitate to the elderly for positive traits, and have contradictory old age images partly because there are such dramatic differences between being young-old and old-old.

Everyone believes that as people get older, memory declines. Elderly people do perform less well than the young on most memory tasks. Memory challenges that are more difficult—such as linking faces to specific situations, remembering bits of information quickly, and especially divided-attention tasks—produce the most severe deficits, and losses in these situations begin at a surprisingly young age.

Using the information-processing perspective, researchers find that as people age, working memory declines because frontal lobe executive functions are impaired. Using the memory-systems perspective, studies reveal few age-related losses in semantic memory or procedural memory but dramatic declines in episodic memory. To improve memory in old age (or at any age), use selective optimization with compensation, employ mnemonic techniques, and work on improving the person’s mental state. Also, understand that when tests are labeled as “for memory,” older people may get too anxious to perform as well as they should, and that late life memory complaints may not relate to a person’s scores on objective memory tests.

Socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that in old age (or at any age), when people see their future as limited, they focus on maximizing the quality of their current life, and prefer to be with their closest attachment figures. This emphasis on enjoying the present, plus the late life positivity effect and lower daily stress, offer compelling reasons for the paradox of well-being, the fact that, in surveys, older people report high levels of happiness. Depression does become a more serious risk when people are old-old and physically frail; but, many older adults preserve their happiness and social connections into advanced old age. Reaching integrity, feeling generative, and having a sense of purpose in life are keys to being happy in old age.

Until recently, most people retired in their early sixties and lived in that state for a large chunk of adult life. The reason was the explosion of government sponsored old-age programs offering developed-world older citizens income for life. Germany has historically been a model of the ultimate in guaranteed, comfortable government support.

In the United States, our main sources of retirement income are Social Security, private pensions, and savings. However, unlike in Germany, Social Security only provides a meager guaranteed income. Today, because most U.S. baby boomers don’t have the funds to fully float retirement, they are planning on working until older ages. When they retire, many U.S. workers may be forced to take post-retirement jobs. The Great Recession of 2008 and the erosion of real wages have made U.S. retirement a more fragile life stage.

Older workers mainly base their retirement decisions on financial considerations, but poor health can also force people to leave work. Age discrimination, although illegal, also propels older people to retire. Even though most negative stereotypes about older workers are false, employers are reluctant to hire older employees. Still, the decision to retire (or not to retire) can be a positive choice. People who choose to keep working into their seventies or eighties are typically healthy and well-educated, with flow-inducing jobs.

Retirees are happy when they have retired on time, freely chosen to leave work, have few health- and money worries, are generative, open to experience, and have an enduring leisure passion. People use these years to further their generativity, to pursue other “bucket list” goals, and to learn. Baby boomers’ inadequate pension and savings, looming cuts to Social Security (partly due to the rising old-age dependency ratio), and age discrimination in the workforce remain serious threats. Still, due to work force shortages, when the massive baby boom cohort all reaches their late sixties in the next decade, people may be more willing to hire older adults. Intergenerational equity issues (especially over-benefiting the elderly) are a concern in nations where retirees have traditionally had many government and pension perks.

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Widowhood is a top-ranking life stress, especially when it strikes old-old people who have been married for their entire adult lives. The early symptoms of bereavement have much in common with the separation response of an infant whose caregiver leaves the room. Rather than being an unmitigated trauma, however, losing a spouse evokes many different emotions and friends loom large in how people cope. Still, widows’ comparatively higher rates of depression and the widowhood mortality effect suggest that this major life event can take an enduring toll.

While women who lose a spouse seem more cushioned by their friend network, widowed men find it much easier to find new mates. For males being widowed suddenly (versus after a spouse’s long illness) and for females losing a spouse at a too young, off-time age, widowhood seems particularly hard. Personality resilience, socioeconomic status, the person’s overall life situation, and cultural forces shape the experience of widowhood, too. Children need to let widowed parents develop new romantic attachments after their mother or father has died.