Now, let’s start our research tour, by first exploring how that important component of thinking, memory, changes during our older years, and then turning to the emotional quality of later life.

When we think of specific cognitive abilities, as we get older, we can look forward to positive changes—expanding our crystallized skills, becoming wise (recall Chapter 12). If you are like people in the poll I mentioned earlier, you would believe that 75-year-olds are more talented at specific abilities such as solving crossword puzzles than the young (Swift, Abrams, & Marques, 2013). These upbeat feelings do not extend to memory. With memory, starting in midlife, we see only decline. (The classic fifty-something phrase is, “Sorry, I’m having a senior moment!”) Once people reach their late sixties and seventies, the wider world is on high alert for memory problems, too.

In a classic study, psychologists demonstrated this mindset by filming actors aged 20, 50, and 70 reading an identical speech. During the talk, each person made a few references to memory problems, such as “I forgot my keys.” Volunteers then watched only the young, middle-aged, or older actor and wrote about what the person was like. Many of the people who saw the 70-year-old described him as forgetful. No one who heard the identical words read by the younger adults even mentioned memory! (See Rodin & Langer, 1980.)

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The reality is that, when a young person forgets something, we pass off the problem as due to external forces: “I was distracted”; “I had too much going on”; “It might be those four glasses of wine I had at dinner last night.” When that person is old, we have a more ominous interpretation: “Perhaps this is the beginning of Alzheimer’s disease” (Erber & Prager, 1999). When you last were with an elderly family member and she forgot a name or appointment, did the idea that “Grandma is declining mentally” cross your mind?

Scanning the Facts

Are older people’s memory abilities really much worse than those of younger adults? Unfortunately, the answer, based on thousands of studies, is yes. In testing everything from the ability to recall unfamiliar faces to the names of new places, from remembering the content of paragraphs to recalling where objects are located in space, the elderly perform more poorly than the young (see Dixon and others, 2007, for a review).

As a memory task gets more difficult, the performance gap between young and old people expands. When psychologists ask old people to recognize an item or word they have previously seen, they do almost as well as 20-year-olds (Danckert & Craik, 2013). The elderly score comparatively worse when they need to come up with that word or name completely on their own. (The distinction here is analogous to taking a multiple-choice exam versus a short-answer test.) Older people perform even more dismally when they have to recall a face or name and link it to a specific context (Dennis and others, 2008; see also Craik, Luo, & Sakuta, 2010): “Yes, I recognize that guy . . . but was he the cable repairman or a guest at Claire’s commencement party last month?”

While connecting names to places, or remembering exactly where we heard some bit of information, is difficult in old age, this task is not easy at any life stage. I’ll never forget when a twenty-something student server blew me away with this comment: “I remember you very well, Dr. Belsky. I learned so much in your English Literature class three years ago.”

The elderly do especially poorly on divided-attention tasks—situations in which they need to memorize material or perform an activity while monitoring something else. Remembering to keep checking the clock so that you don’t miss your 3 p.m. class, texting or spending time on Facebook while “listening” to a lecture—these multitasking activities impair memory performance at any age (Craik, Luo, & Sakuta, 2010). Warning! This is a documented fact! But while young people can master these kinds of difficult divided-attention tasks, they are virtually impossible in old age (Gothe, Oberauer, & Kliegl, 2008).

More depressing, when researchers pile on the memory demands and add time pressures, deficits show up as early as the late twenties (Borella, Carretti, & De Beni, 2008). Returning to the previous chapter, it makes sense that when people have to remember new, random bits of information very fast, losses take place soon after youth. These requirements are prime examples of fluid intelligence tasks.

What is going wrong with memory as we age? Let’s get insights from examining two different ways of conceptualizing “a memory”: the information-processing and memory-systems approaches.

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An Information-Processing Perspective on Memory Change

Remember from Chapters 3 and 5 that developmentalists who adopt an information-processing theory perspective on cognition see memory as progressing through stages. The gateway system, which transforms information into more permanent storage, is called working memory.

Working memory, as I mentioned in Chapter 5, contains a limited memory-bin space—the amount of information we can keep in our awareness. It includes an executive processor that controls our attention and transforms the contents of this temporary storage facility into material we can remember later on. Recall that, during childhood, as the frontal lobes mature, working memory-bin capacity dramatically improves. Unfortunately, as we travel through adulthood, working memory works worse and worse (McCabe and others, 2010; Reuter-Lorenz, 2013).

What explains this decline? Experts target deficits with the executive processor, that hypothetical structure responsible for manipulating material into the permanent memory store. As people age, they have more problems with focusing this master controller and so can’t attend as well to what they need to learn (Müller-Oehring and others, 2013; Ofen & Shing, 2013; Rowe, Hasher, & Turcotte, 2008). One classic symptom of this executive function deficit, as you just saw, is that older people have exceptional trouble mastering divided-attention tasks.

When we think of executive functions such as selective attention, a particular brain structure comes to mind. Later-life memory deficits, according to current thinking, mainly reflect age-related deterioration in the frontal lobes (Reuter-Lorenz, 2013). Neuroscientists can vividly “see” this cortical thinning by taking images of the brain (Müller-Oehring, 2013; Fjell and others, 2014). Brain-imaging studies reveal an erosion of myelin in the frontal lobes is typical during the older years (Lu and others, 2013). Although they can’t directly view individual neurons, based on autopsying animals, scientists now believe that synaptic loss also characterizes the elderly brain (Samson & Barnes, 2013).

How does the older brain adapt? Because brain-imaging techniques allow us to track activation patterns when adults are given memory tasks, they also offer fascinating information about this issue.

With easy memory challenges, such as remembering a few items, notice from Figure 13.2 that older adults show a broader pattern of frontal-lobe activity compared to young adults (Reuter-Lorenz, 2013; Friedman & Johnson, 2014). But, as the task gets difficult, the older brain shifts to underactivation—suggesting that it totally maxed out! (See Park & McDonough, 2013; Reuter-Lorenz, 2013.)

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This finding is very depressing. Does the aging brain have to work on overdrive and then ultimately “give up” (neurologically speaking) in remembering everything? Luckily, the answer is no. Some memories are more indelibly carved in our mind.

A Memory-Systems Perspective on Change

Think of the amazing resilience of some memories and the incredible vulnerability of others. Why do you automatically remember how to hold a tennis racquet even though you have not been on a court for years? Why is “George Washington,” the name of our first president, locked in your mind while you are incapable of remembering what you had for dinner three days ago? These kinds of memories seem to differ in ways that go beyond how much effort went into embedding them into our minds. They seem qualitatively different in a fundamental way.

According to the memory-systems perspective (Craik, 2000; Tulving, 1985), there are three basic types of memory:

As you can see in these examples and those described in Table 13.2, episodic memory is the most fragile system. A year from now you will still remember who George Washington is (semantic memory). You will recall how to get on the bike and use the handlebars to pace your speed (procedural memory). However, even a few days later, you are likely to forget what you had for dinner on a particular night. Remembering isolated events—from what day we last went bike riding, to what we ate last Tuesday, to the paragraph you are reading now—are especially vulnerable to time.

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The good news is that on tests of semantic memory older people may do as well as the young (Dixon and others, 2007). Procedural memory is amazingly long-lasting, as we know when we get on a bike after not having ridden for decades, and take off down the road. The real age loss occurs in episodic memory—remembering the details of daily life.

This decline in episodic memory is what people notice when they realize they are having more trouble remembering the name of a person at a party or where they parked the car. Our databank of semantic memories stays intact until well into later life (Ofen & Shing, 2013)—explaining why we expect older people to outperform the young at crystallized verbal challenges such as crossword puzzles. People with Alzheimer’s disease can retain procedural memories after the other memory systems are largely gone. They can walk, dress themselves, and even remember (to the horror of caregivers) how to turn on the ignition and drive after losing their ability to recall basic facts, such as where they live.

The incredible resilience of procedural memory explains why your 85-year-old aunt, who was a musician, can still play the piano beautifully, even though she is now incapable of remembering family members’ names. Why is this particular system the last to go? The reason, according to neuropsychologists, is that the information in procedural memory resides in a different region of the brain. When we first learn a complex motor skill, such as driving or playing an instrument, our frontal lobes are heavily involved. Then, after we have thoroughly learned that activity, this knowledge becomes automatic and migrates to a lower brain center, which frees up our frontal cortex for mastering other higher-level thinking tasks (Friedman, 2003).

Actually, this is good. If I had to focus on remembering how to type these words on my computer, would I ever be able to simultaneously do the complicated mental work of figuring out how to describe the concepts I am explaining now?

In sum, the message with regard to age and memory is both worse and also far better than we might have thought: As we get older, we do not have to worry much about remembering basic facts. Our storehouse of crystallized knowledge is “really there.” However, we will have more trouble memorizing bits of new information, and these losses in episodic memory show up at a surprisingly early age.

Everyone believes that memory declines with age. But as I mentioned earlier, we have more positive ideas about our emotional lives. Does old age really bring serenity and emotional balance? Laura Carstensen believes it does.

Focusing on Time Left to Live: Socioemotional Selectivity Theory

Imagine that you are elderly and aware that you have a limited time left to live. How might your goals and priorities change? The idea that our place on the lifespan changes our life agendas is the premise of Carstensen’s socioemotional selectivity theory.

According to Carstensen (1995), during the first half of adult life, our push is to look to the future. We are eager to make it in the wider world. We want to reach a better place at some later date. As we grow older and realize that our future is limited, we refocus our priorities. We want to make the most of our present life.

Carstensen believes that this focus on making the most of every moment explains why late life is potentially the happiest life stage. When our agenda lies in the future, we often forgo our immediate desires in the service of a later goal. Instead of telling off the boss who insults us, we hold our tongue because this authority figure holds the key to getting ahead. We are nice to that nasty person, or go to that dinner party we would rather pass up in order to advance socially or in our career. We accept the anxiety-ridden months when we first move to an unfamiliar city because we expect to feel better than ever in a year or two.

In later life, we are less interested in where we will be going. So we refuse to waste time with unpleasant people or enter anxiety-provoking situations because they may have a payoff at some later point. Almost unconsciously, we decide, “I don’t have that long to live. I have to spend my time doing what makes me feel good emotionally right now.”

Furthermore, when our passion lies in making the most of the present, Carstensen argues, our social priorities shift. During childhood, adolescence, and emerging adulthood our mission is to leave our attachment figures. We want to expand our social horizons, form new close relationships, and connect with exciting new people who can teach us new things. Once we have achieved our life goals, we are less interested in developing new attachments. We already have our family and network of caring friends. So we center our lives on our spouse, our best friends, and our children—the people we love the most.

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Actually, as we travel throughout adulthood our social networks do shrink, and we center our lives more on family than friends (Wrzus and others, 2013). Moreover, perhaps partly due to years of experience managing complex social situations (see the previous chapter), the elderly report more positive interpersonal encounters than the young (English & Carstensen, 2014).

Older people, Carstensen finds, carefully limit their social encounters, too. When her research team asked elderly and young people, “Who would you rather spend time with—a close family member, an acquaintance, or the author of a recent book?” Young people’s choices were spread among the three possible partners. Older people chose overwhelmingly to be with the family member, their closest attachment figure in life (Fung, Lai, & Ng, 2001).

When Do We Prioritize the Present Regardless of Our Life Stage?

But is this change in priorities simply a function of being old? The answer is no. Adults with fatal illnesses also voted to spend an evening with a familiar close person. So did people who were asked to imagine that they were about to move across the country alone. According to Carstensen, whenever we see our future as limited, we pare down our social contacts, maximize our positive experiences, and spend time with the people we care about the most.

Socioemotional selectivity theory explains why—although normally you are content to live a continent away—when you are in danger of losing a loved one, you want to be physically close. So, you fly in to spend time with your beloved grandma when she is seriously ill. You insist on spending a weekend with your high school friend who is leaving for a tour of duty in the military in some dangerous part of the world.

The theory accounts for the choices my cousin Clinton made when he was diagnosed with lymphoma in his early twenties. An exceptionally gifted architect, Clinton gave up his promising career and retired to rural New Hampshire to build houses, hike, and ski for what turned out to be another quarter-century of life. Clinton’s funeral, at age 50, was an unforgettable celebration—a testament to a person who, although his life was shorter than most, lived fully for longer than many people who survive to twice this age. Have you ever seen the principles of socioemotional selectivity theory in operation in your own life?

Making the Case for Old Age as the Best Time of Life

This passion to make the most of every moment may partly explain the paradox of well-being—the puzzling research fact that, as I mentioned in Chapter 12, happiness improves well into later life (Gana and others, 2013). Here are two additional (related) causes:

OLDER PEOPLE PRIORITIZE POSITIVE EMOTIONAL STATES. This bias to focus on positive experiences, alluded to earlier, has been so well documented by now that it has its own label: the positivity effect. To take one example, imagine being at a casino and sitting next to an elderly adult. Carstensen’s research suggests the older person will be just as happy as you when she expects to win. But she probably won’t be upset (or will get far less disturbed) when she loses (Nielsen, Knutson, & Carstensen, 2008).

People of every age, as I described in the previous section, remember emotional stimuli best. However, the elderly perform better when asked to recall happy versus sad images and faces (Simon and others, 2013).

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Older people also view their distressing life experiences in a less gloomy way. When asked to describe an upsetting event in their past, older adults used fewer negative emotions and described far less anxiety than did younger adults (Robertson & Hopko, 2013). When Carstensen’s research team had different age groups listen to stories about a 25-year-old and a 75-year-old, then asked these volunteers to retell the stories from the perspective of each person, the elderly participants used more positive statements when talking from the older person’s point of view. The younger adults showed no signs of understanding that old people might think differently than the young (Sullivan, Mikels, & Carstensen, 2010). So, not only are older people adept at minimizing negativity, they have a secret knowledge you only get from reaching later life. In old age, we can rise above the storms of daily life.

If you need more evidence that age offers this serene bird’s-eye perspective, consider a remarkable poll charting the emotional states of over 40,000 Australian adults over age 40: While younger adults were more apt to describe intense highs and lows, the elderly more often reported feeling calm and peaceful than the middle-aged group (Windsor, Burns, & Byles, 2013).

OLDER PEOPLE LIVE LESS-STRESSFUL LIVES. Actually, there are clear, external reasons why old age should be a worry-free life stage: No longer having the hassles of raising children or the gut-churning pressures to perform at work. Older people report fewer daily stresses than the young (Charles & Almeida, 2007; Charles and others, 2010; von Hippel, Henry, & Matovic, 2008). An added bonus is that the outside world treats you with special care (Luong, Charles, & Fingerman, 2010). In one study, when researchers asked adults how they would react in a difficult interpersonal situation, people said they would be prone to hold off confronting someone if that individual was old (Fingerman, Miller, & Charles, 2008). An elderly speaker alerted my class to this interesting perk when he mentioned, “The best thing about being 88 is that everyone is incredibly nice!” If strangers opened doors for you, people forgave your foibles, and everyone made a special effort to be kind, wouldn’t you feel better about life and the human race?

So knowing your life will end, and many years spent living, provide surprising emotional bonuses. Moreover, in old age, people have more luxury to do just what they want, and the outside world hassles them less!

What Can Make Old Age the Unhappiest Time of Life?

But at this point, many of you may be thinking, “Something is wrong with this picture.” What about the miserable elderly people who the world doesn’t treat so kindly, older adults left to languish, lonely and impoverished, in their so-called golden years? When I gave talks on successful aging at local senior centers in my thirties (some gall!), I vividly recall one 89-year-old woman who put me in my place: “Wait till you are my age, young lady. Then you will really know how terrible it is to be old!”

The erosion of U.S. retirement as a life stage (to be described in the next section) is destined to impair the emotional quality of old age. As “social connectedness” is critical to human happiness, widowhood and outliving friends must take a psychological toll. Now, combine this with the physical losses of advanced old age, and it should come as no surprise that some studies show happiness takes a nosedive as people approach the old-old years (Dozeman and others, 2010; Rothermund & Brandstädter, 2003).

So, the paradox of well-being extends only so far. When people are frail or disabled and death looms on the horizon, life can lose all of its purpose and joy. As one formerly ideally-aging man wrote: “I was still driving, walking . . . and feeling pretty confident about my condition . . . at age 87; now after three more years of age-related decline, I’ve almost had enough. . . . Without (my wife) . . . I would be hard pressed to find reasons to get up in the morning. Even with Kathe, I’ve begun to feel that I’ve almost had enough living without the people and possessions that shaped my life” (adapted from Crum, 2014, p. 6).

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Still, let’s not stereotype all ninety-somethings as in a dismal holding pattern, waiting for death. As my inspiring interview with Jules in the Experiencing the Lifespan box shows, some people live exceptionally gratifying lives at the uppermost limits of life.

Decoding Some Keys to Happiness in Old Age

Do you have an old-age role model such as Jules, someone who believes he is continuing to develop as a person at age 90 or 94? What makes these people stand out? For one thing, Jules demonstrates the openness to experience, self-efficacy, and ability to reinterpret upsetting life events as growth experiences that define being wise (Etezadi & Pushkar, 2013; recall the previous chapter). What is particularly striking is this master therapist’s generativity, and the fact that Jules has reached Erikson’s milestone of integrity (see Table 13.3). Jules knows he has lived according to the prophetic guidelines that he views at the core of having a meaningful life.

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Erikson believed that, to reach integrity, older people must review their lives and make peace with what they have previously done. But, happiness in old age does not involve dwelling on the past. As with Jules, it involves finding purpose and meaning in your present life (Burr, Santo, & Pushkar, 2011).

Moreover, younger readers might be interested to know that, apart from everything else, having a sense of life purpose also predicts living longer. In one mammoth longitudinal study, adults of every age who agreed with questionnaire items such as, “I wander aimlessly through life,” died at earlier ages than their peers (Hill & Turiano, 2014).

By now you might be thinking that I am being far, far too positive. Clearly, people who remain upbeat emotionally and connected socially in advanced old age are rare. Not so fast! In four studies tracking Swedish people as they moved through their eighties, researchers did find specific groups declined dramatically cognitively or were isolated and depressed. But, the largest fraction of this oldest-old group remained stable in terms of life satisfaction and being socially engaged. They retained a reasonably good memory, too (Morack and others, 2013).

Live purposefully, be open to experience, remain lovingly attached, be generative—these are some keys to aging happily into advanced old age (and living happily during any stage of adult life!).

Question 13.1

Dwayne should present concepts more slowly (but not talk down to his audience) and refrain from presenting a good deal of information in a single session. He should tie the course content into older adults’ knowledge base or crystallized skills and strive to make the material relevant personally. He might offer tips on using mnemonic techniques. He should continually work on reducing memory fears: “With your life experience, learning this stuff should be a piece of cake!”

Question 13.2

1. Someone asks you for your street address.

2. Someone asks you what you just read in this chapter.

3. You go bike riding.

a. semantic memory b. episodic memory c. procedural memory

Question 13.3

1) Bike riding, that automatic skill, is “in” procedural memory, so it can be maintained even into Alzheimer’s disease. 2) Remembering the material in this chapter, since it is in the most fragile system (episodic memory), is apt to decline at a relatively young age.

Question 13.4

The answers here are up to you

Question 13.5

1. Frances says, “Now that I’m older, I want to meet as many new people as possible.”

2. Allen reports, “I’m enjoying life more than ever today. I’m savoring every moment—and what a pleasure it is to do just what I want!”

3. Milly mentions, “I’ve been spending as much time as possible with my family, the people who matter to me the most.”

b and c

Question 13.6

Older people (1) focus on enjoying the present, (2) selectively screen out negativity, and (3) live less-stressful lives.