integrated care: Cooperative actions by professionals, friends, family members, and the care receiver to achieve optimal caregiving.

compulsive hoarding: The urge to accumulate and hold on to familiar objects and possessions, sometimes to the point of their becoming health and/or safety hazards. This impulse tends to increase with age.

stratification theories: Theories that emphasize that social forces, particularly those related to a person’s social stratum or social category, limit individual choices and affect a person’s ability to function in late adulthood because past stratification continues to limit life in various ways.

naturally occurring retirement community (NORC): A neighborhood or apartment complex whose population is mostly retired people who moved to the location as younger adults and never left.

frail elderly: Older adults who are severely impaired, usually unable to care for themselves.

self theories: Theories of late adulthood that emphasize the core self, or the search to maintain one’s integrity and identity.

filial responsibility: The obligation of adult children to care for their aging parents.

age in place: To remain in the same home and community in later life, adjusting but not leaving when health fades.

socio-emotional selectivity theory: The theory that older people prioritize regulation of their own emotions and seek familiar social contacts who reinforce generativity, pride, and joy.

activities of daily life (ADLs): Typically identified as five tasks of self-care: eating, bathing, toileting, dressing, and transferring from a bed to a chair.

activity theory: The view that elderly people want and need to remain active in a variety of social spheres—with relatives, friends, and community groups.

instrumental activities of daily life (IADLs): Actions (for example, paying bills and driving a car) that are important to independent living and that require some intellectual competence and forethought.

integrity versus despair: The final stage of Erik Erikson’s developmental sequence, in which older adults seek to integrate their unique experiences with their vision of community.

disengagement theory: The view that aging makes a person’s social sphere increasingly narrow, resulting in role relinquishment, withdrawal, and passivity.

positivity effect: The tendency for elderly people to perceive, prefer, and remember positive images and experiences more than negative ones.