11.4 Adulthood: Change We Can’t Believe In

It takes fewer than 7,000 days for a single-celled zygote to become a registered voter. Adulthood is the stage of development that begins around 18 to 21 years and ends at death. Because physical change slows from a gallop to a crawl, many of us think of adulthood as the destination to which the process of development finally delivers us, and that once we’ve arrived, our journey is pretty much complete. Nothing could be further from the truth because a whole host of physical, cognitive, and emotional changes take place between our first legal beer and our last legal breath.

Changing Abilities

The early 20s are the peak years for health, stamina, vigor, and prowess, and because our psychology is so closely tied to our biology, these are also the years during which most of our cognitive abilities are at their sharpest. At this very moment you probably see farther, hear better, remember more, and weigh less than you ever will again. Enjoy it while you can. This glorious moment at your physical peak will last for just a few dozen months more—and then, somewhere between the ages of 26 and 30, you will begin the slow and steady decline that will not end until you do. Just 10 or 15 years after puberty, your body will begin to break down in almost every way. Your muscles will be replaced by fat, your skin will become less elastic, your hair will thin and your bones will weaken, your sensory abilities will become less acute, and your brain cells will die at an accelerated rate. Eventually, if you are a woman, your ovaries will stop producing eggs and you will become infertile. Eventually, if you are a man, your erections will be softer and fewer and farther between. Indeed, other than being more resistant to colds and less sensitive to pain, your elderly body just won’t work as well as your youthful body does.

HOT SCIENCE: The End of History Illusion

“I’ve finally arrived.” That’s the feeling that many young adults have when they look back at the fast-paced changes of childhood and adolescence, and look forward to the relatively smooth sailing of adulthood. But recent research suggests that this feeling of having arrived is actually an illusion—and one that people succumb to throughout their entire lives.

In a recent study (Quoidbach, Gilbert, & Wilson, 2013), researchers asked thousands of people to recall how much their personalities had changed in the last 10 years, or to predict how much their personalities would change in the next 10 years. They then compared the “looking back” memories of people who were a particular age with the “looking forward” predictions of people who were 10 years younger. So, for example, they compared how much 18-year-olds thought their personalities would change with how much 28-year-olds remembered their personalities had changed, and they did this for people from 18 to 68 years old.

As the graph shows, people who were looking back at a particular decade of life saw much more change than people who were looking forward to it—and this was true of every decade between 18 and 68! The researchers found precisely the same pattern when they asked people to remember and predict changes in their basic values and preferences. They called this phenomenon the end of history illusion.

Adulthood, it seems, is a period of life that is characterized by unanticipated change, or “change we can’t believe in.” Although both teenagers and their grandparents seem to think that the pace of personal change has slowed to a crawl and that they have finally become the people they will forever be, the data suggest that it simply isn’t so. Change slows but never stops, and its pace is faster than we expect.

But don’t worry, it gets worse. Because as these physical changes accumulate, they will begin to have measurable psychological consequences (Salthouse, 2006); see FIGURE 11.17). For instance, as your brain ages, your prefrontal cortex and its associated subcortical connections will deteriorate more quickly than the other areas of your brain (Raz, 2000), and you will experience a noticeable decline on cognitive tasks that require effort, initiative, or strategy. Your memory will worsen, though not all kinds will worsen at the same rate. You will experience a greater decline in working memory (the ability to hold information “in mind”) than in long-term memory (the ability to retrieve information), a greater decline in episodic memory (the ability to remember particular past events) than in semantic memory (the ability to remember general information such as the meanings of words), a greater decline in retrieval accuracy than recognition accuracy, a greater decline in…um…something else that we can’t remember just now.

Figure 11.17: Cognitive Decline After the age of 20, people show dramatic declines on some measures of cognitive performance but not others (Salthouse, 2006). For example, the ability to recall past events (episodic memory) declines as we age, but the ability to recall the meanings of words (semantic memory) does not.

Is the news all bad? Not really. Because even though your cognitive machinery will get rustier, research suggests that you will partially compensate by using it much more skillfully (Bäckman & Dixon, 1992; Salthouse, 1987). Older chess players remember chess positions much more poorly than younger players do, but they play just as well because they learn to search the board more efficiently (Charness, 1981). Older typists react more slowly than younger typists do, but they type just as quickly and accurately as because they are better at anticipating the next word in spoken or written text (Salthouse, 1984). Older airline pilots are considerably worse than younger pilots when it comes to keeping a list of words in short-term memory, but this age difference disappears when those words are the heading commands that pilots receive from the control tower every day (Morrow et al., 1994). All of this suggests that older adults are compensating for the age-related declines they experience in memory and attention (Park & McDonough, 2013).

One week before his 58th birthday, US Airways pilot Chesley Sullenberger made a perfect emergency landing in the Hudson River and saved the lives of every one on board. None of the passengers wish they’d had a younger pilot.

AP PHOTO/NOAH BERGER
AP PHOTO/STEVEN DAY

How do they do that? As you know from the Neuroscience and Behavior chapter, young brains are highly differentiated, that is, they have different parts that do different things. We now know that as the brain ages it becomes de-differentiated (Lindenberger & Baltes, 1994). For example, regions of the visual cortex that specialize in face and scene perception in younger people are much less specialized in older people (Grady et al., 1992; Park et al., 2004). It appears that the brain is like a group of specialists that work independently when they are young and able, but that pull together as a team when each of the specialists get older and slower (Park & McDonough, 2013). For example, when young adults try to keep verbal information in working memory, the left prefrontal cortex is more strongly activated than the right, and when young adults try to keep spatial information in working memory, the right prefrontal cortex is more strongly activated than the left (Smith & Jonides, 1997). But this bilateral asymmetry pretty much disappears in older adults, which suggests that the older brain is compensating for the declining abilities of each individual neural structure by calling on its other neural structures to help out (Cabeza, 2002; see FIGURE 11.18). The physical machinery breaks down as time passes, and one of the ways in which the brain rises to that challenge is by changing its division of labor.

Figure 11.18: Bilaterality in Older and Younger Brains Across a variety of tasks, older adult brains show bilateral activation and young adult brains show unilateral activation. One explanation for this is that older brains compensate for the declining abilities of one neural structure by calling on other neural structures for help (Cabeza, 2002).

ROBERTO CABEZA, CENTER FOR COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE, DUKE UNIVERSITY. (A) CABEZA ET AL. (1997); (B) BACKMAN ET AL. (1997).

Changing Goals

As people age, they prefer to spend time with family and a few close friends rather than large circles of acquaintances.

COURTESY OF DANIEL GILBERT

One reason why Grandpa can’t find his car keys is that his prefrontal cortex doesn’t work as well as it used to. But another reason is that the location of car keys just isn’t the sort of thing that grandpas want to spend their precious time memorizing (Haase, Heckhausen, & Wrosch, 2013). According to socioemotional selectivity theory (Carstensen & Turk-Charles, 1994), younger adults are largely oriented toward the acquisition of information that will be useful to them in the future (e.g., reading reviews), whereas older adults are generally oriented toward information that brings emotional satisfaction in the present (e.g., reading novels). Because young people have such long futures, they invest their time attending to, thinking about, and remembering potentially useful information that can serve them well tomorrow. Because older people have much shorter futures, they spend their time attending to, thinking about, and remembering positive information that serves them well today (see FIGURE 11.19).

Figure 11.19: Memory for Pictures Memory generally declines with age, but the ability to remember negative information—such as unpleasant pictures—declines much more quickly than the ability to remember positive information (Carstensen et al., 2000).

Getting old isn’t as bad as people think, and even holds a few nice surprises. For example, one study of women aged 40 to 100 showed that the oldest women were nearly twice as likely as the youngest ones to report being “very satisfied” with their sex lives (Trompeter, Bettencourt, & Barrett-Connor, 2012).

LUCY NICHOLSON/REUTERS/NEWSCOM

For example, older people perform much more poorly than younger people when they are asked to remember a series of unpleasant faces, but only slightly more poorly when they are asked to remember a series of pleasant faces (Mather & Carstensen, 2003). Whereas younger adults show equal amounts of amygdala activation when they see very pleasant or very unpleasant pictures, older adults show much more activation when they see very pleasant than very unpleasant pictures, suggesting that older adults just aren’t attending to information that doesn’t make them happy (Mather et al., 2004). Indeed, compared to younger adults, older adults are generally better at sustaining positive emotions and curtailing negative ones (Isaacowitz, 2012; Isaacowitz & Blanchard-Fields, 2012; Lawton et al., 1992; Mather & Carstensen, 2005). They also experience fewer negative emotions (Carstensen et al., 2000; Charles, Reynolds, & Gatz, 2001; Mroczek & Spiro, 2005; Schilling, Wahl, & Wiegering, 2013), and are more accepting of them when they do (Shallcross et al., 2013). Given all this, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that late adulthood is consistently reported to be one of the happiest and most satisfying periods of life (see FIGURE 11.20). You shouldn’t be surprised, but you probably are because young adults vastly overestimate the problems of aging (Pew Research Center for People & the Press, 2009; see FIGURE 11.21).

Figure 11.20: Emotions and Age Older adults experience much lower levels of stress, worry, and anger than younger adults do (Stone et al., 2010).

Figure 11.21: It’s Better Than You Think Research shows that young adults overestimate the problems of old age (Pew Research Center for People & the Press, 2009).

Because having a short future orients people toward emotionally satisfying rather than intellectually profitable experiences, older adults become more selective about their interaction partners, choosing to spend time with family and a few close friends rather than with a large circle of acquaintances. One study monitored a group of people from the 1930s to the 1990s and found that their rate of interaction with acquaintances declined from early to middle adulthood, but their rate of interaction with spouses, parents, and siblings remained stable or increased (Carstensen, 1992). A study of older adults who ranged in age from 69 to 104 found that the oldest adults had fewer peripheral social partners than the younger adults did, but they had just as many emotionally close partners whom they identified as members of their “inner circle” (Lang & Carstensen, 1994). “Let’s go meet some new people” isn’t something that most 60-year-olds tend to say, but “Let’s go hang out with some old friends” is. It is sad but instructive to note that many of these same cognitive and emotional changes can be observed among younger people who have discovered that their futures will be short because of a terminal illness (Carstensen & Fredrickson, 1998).

Changing Roles

Does marriage make people happy or do happy people tend to get married?

COURTESY OF DANIEL GILBERT

The psychological separation from parents that begins in adolescence usually becomes a physical separation in adulthood. In virtually all human societies, young adults leave home, get married, and have children of their own. Marriage and parenthood are two of the most significant aspects of adult life. Census statistics suggest that if you are right now a college-age American, then you are likely to get married at around the age of 27, have approximately 1.8 children, and consider both your partner and your children to be your greatest sources of joy. Indeed, a whopping 93% of American mothers say that their children are a source of happiness all or most of the time (Pew Research Center, 1997).

But do marriage and children really make us happy? Research shows that married people live longer (see FIGURE 11.22), have more frequent sex (and enjoy that sex more), and earn several times as much money as unmarried people do (Waite, 1995). Given these differences, it is no surprise that married people report being happier than unmarried people—whether those unmarried people are single, widowed, divorced, or cohabiting (Johnson & Wu, 2002). That’s why many researchers consider marriage one of the best investments individuals can make in their own happiness. But other researchers suggest that married people may be happier because happy people may be more likely to get married, and that marriage may be the consequence—and not the cause—of happiness (Lucas et al., 2003). The general consensus among scientists seems to be that both of these positions have merit: Even before marriage, people who end up married tend to be happier than those who never marry, but marriage does seem to confer further benefits.

Figure 11.22: Til Death Do Us Part Married people live longer than unmarried people, and this is true of both men and women. But while widowed men die as young as never-married and divorced men do (a), widowed women live longer than never-married or divorced women do (b). In other words, the loss of a wife is always bad, but the loss of a husband is only bad if you let him live! (Lillard & Waite, 1995)

Children are another story. In general, research suggests that children do not increase their parents’ happiness, and may even decrease it (DiTella, MacCulloch, & Oswald, 2003; Simon, 2008; Senior, 2014). For example, parents typically report lower marital satisfaction than do nonparents—and the more children they have, the less satisfaction they report (Twenge, Campbell, & Foster, 2003). Studies of marital satisfaction at different points in the life span reveal an interesting pattern of peaks and valleys: Marital satisfaction starts out high, plummets at about the time that the children are in diapers, begins to recover, plummets again when the children are in adolescence, and returns to its premarital levels only when children leave home (see FIGURE 11.23). Given that mothers typically do much more child care than fathers, it is not surprising that the negative impact of parenthood is stronger for women than for men. Women with young children are especially likely to experience role conflicts (“How am I supposed to manage being a full-time lawyer and a full-time mother?”) and restrictions of freedom (“I never get to play tennis anymore”). A study that measured the moment-to-moment happiness of American women as they went about their daily activities found that women were less happy when taking care of their children than when eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television—and only slightly happier than when they were doing housework (Kahneman et al., 2004).

Figure 11.23: Marital Satisfaction over the Life Span This graph shows the results of four independent studies of marital satisfaction among men and women. All four studies suggest that marital satisfaction is highest before children are born and after they leave home (Walker, 1977).

Does all of this mean that people would be happier if they didn’t have children? Not necessarily. Because researchers cannot randomly assign people to be parents or nonparents, studies of the effects of parenthood are necessarily correlational. People who want children and have children may be somewhat less happy than people who neither want them nor have them, but it is possible that people who want children would be even less happy if they didn’t have them. What does seem clear is that raising children is a challenging job that most people find especially rewarding when they’re not in the middle of doing it.

OTHER VOICES: You Are Going to Die

Tim Kreider is an essayist and cartoonist whose newest book is We Learn Nothing.

PHOTO: TIM KREIDER/EINSTEIN THOMPSON AGENCY, NY, NY

Human development begins at conception and ends at death. Most of us would rather think about the conception part. Getting old seems scary and depressing, and one of the reasons why we send elderly people to retirement homes is so we don’t have to watch as they wrinkle and wither and die. The essayist Tim Kreider (2013) thinks this is a terrible loss—not for older people, but for younger ones.

My sister and I recently toured the retirement community where my mother has announced she’ll be moving. I have been in some bleak clinical facilities for the elderly where not one person was compos mentis and I had to politely suppress the urge to flee, but this was nothing like that. It was a very cushy modern complex housed in what used to be a seminary, with individual condominiums with big kitchens and sun rooms, equipped with fancy restaurants, grills and snack bars, a fitness center, a concert hall, a library, an art room, a couple of beauty salons, a bank and an ornate chapel of Italian marble. You could walk from any building in the complex to another without ever going outside, through underground corridors and glass-enclosed walkways through the woods. Mom described it as “like a college dorm, except the boys aren’t as good-looking.” Nonetheless I spent much of my day trying not to cry.

At all times of major life crisis, friends and family will crowd around and press upon you the false emotions appropriate to the occasion. “That’s so great!” everyone said of my mother’s decision to move to an assisted-living facility. “It’s really impressive that she decided to do that herself.” They cited their own stories of 90-year-old parents grimly clinging to drafty dilapidated houses, refusing to move until forced out by strokes or broken hips. “You should be really relieved and grateful.” “She’ll be much happier there.” The overbearing unanimity of this chorus suggests to me that its real purpose is less to reassure than to suppress, to deny the most obvious and natural emotion that attends this occasion, which is sadness.

My sadness is purely selfish, I know. My friends are right; this was all Mom’s idea, she’s looking forward to it, and she really will be happier there. But it also means losing the farm my father bought in 1976, where my sister and I grew up, where Dad died in 1991. We’re losing our old phone number, the one we’ve had since the Ford administration, a number I know as well as my own middle name. However infrequently I go there, it is the place on earth that feels like home to me, the place I’ll always have to go back to in case adulthood falls through. I hadn’t realized, until I was forcibly divested of it, that I’d been harboring the idea that someday, when this whole crazy adventure was over, I would at some point be nine again, sitting around the dinner table with Mom and Dad and my sister. And beneath it all, even at age 45, there is the irrational, little-kid fear: Who’s going to take care of me? I remember my mother telling me that when her own mother died, when Mom was in her 40s, her first thought was: I’m an orphan.

Plenty of people before me have lamented the way that we in industrialized countries regard our elderly as unproductive workers or obsolete products, and lock them away in institutions instead of taking them into our own homes out of devotion and duty. Most of these critiques are directed at the indifference and cruelty thus displayed to the elderly; what I wonder about is what it’s doing to the rest of us.

Segregating the old and the sick enables a fantasy, as baseless as the fantasy of capitalism’s endless expansion, of youth and health as eternal, in which old age can seem to be an inexplicably bad lifestyle choice, like eating junk food or buying a minivan, that you can avoid if you’re well-educated or hip enough. So that when through absolutely no fault of your own your eyesight begins to blur and you can no longer eat whatever you want without consequence and the hangovers start lasting for days, you feel somehow ripped off, lied to. Aging feels grotesquely unfair. As if there ought to be someone to sue.

We don’t see old or infirm people much in movies or on TV. We love explosive gory death onscreen, but we’re not so enamored of the creeping, gray, incontinent kind. Aging and death are embarrassing medical conditions, like hemorrhoids or eczema, best kept out of sight. Survivors of serious illness or injuries have written that, once they were sick or disabled, they found themselves confined to a different world, a world of sick people, invisible to the rest of us. Denis Johnson writes in his novel Jesus’ Son: “You and I don’t know about these diseases until we get them, in which case we also will be put out of sight.”

My own father died at home, in what was once my childhood bedroom. He was, in this respect at least, a lucky man. Almost everyone dies in a hospital now, even though absolutely nobody wants to, because by the time we’re dying all the decisions have been taken out of our hands by the well, and the well are without mercy. Of course we hospitalize the sick and the old for some good reasons (better care, pain relief), but I think we also segregate the elderly from the rest of society because we’re afraid of them, as if age might be contagious. Which, it turns out, it is.

…You are older at this moment than you’ve ever been before, and it’s the youngest you’re ever going to get. The mortality rate is holding at a scandalous 100 percent. Pretending death can be indefinitely evaded with hot yoga or a gluten-free diet or antioxidants or just by refusing to look is craven denial. “Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through,” Conrad wrote in Typhoon. “Face it.” He was talking about more than storms. The sheltered prince Siddartha Gautama was supposedly set on the path to becoming the Buddha when he was out riding and happened to see an old man, a sick man and a dead man. Today he’d be spared the discomfiture, and the enlightenment, unless he were riding mass transit.

Just yesterday my mother sent me a poem she first read in college—Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son.” She said she could still remember where she was, in her dorm room at Goshen College, when she came across it in her American Lit book. The title notwithstanding, it does not make for Hallmark-card copy. Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. It tells us that this life is not a story or an adventure or a journey of spiritual self-discovery; it’s a slog. And it orders us to keep going, don’t you dare give up, no matter what. Because I’m your mother, that’s why.

Do you agree with Kreider: Do we do a disservice to the young when we segregate the old?

From the New York Times, January 20, 2013. © 2013 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/you-are-going-to-die