25.1 Theories of Late Adulthood

Development in late adulthood may be more diverse than at any other age: Some elderly people run marathons and lead nations; others no longer walk or talk. Social scientists theorize about these variations.

Self Theories

Some theories of late adulthood are self theories; they focus on individuals’ self-concepts and their response to challenges to their identity. The awareness of one’s self begins, as you remember, before age 2, and it builds throughout childhood and adolescence. In those early decades, self image is greatly affected by physical appearance and by other people’s perceptions (Harter & Bukowski, 2012), both of which become less crucial with age.

Perhaps people become more truly themselves as they grow old, as Anna Quindlen found:

Older adults need to maintain their self-concept despite all the changes of senescence, as appearance and social status are altered in ways that might undercut self-esteem. In late adulthood, the “creation and maintenance of identity is a key aspect of healthy living” (Resnick, 2011, p. 10). Even the oldest-old and those who suffer from neurocognitive disorders preserve their sense of self, although memory, ability, and health fade (Klein, 2012).

A central idea of self theories is that each person ultimately depends on himself or herself. As one woman explained:

The most comprehensive self theory came from Erik Erikson. His eighth and final stage of development, integrity versus despair, occurs when adults seek to integrate their unique experiences with their vision of community (Erikson et al., 1986). The word integrity is often used to mean honesty, but it also means a feeling of being whole, not scattered, comfortable with oneself.

As an example of integrity, many older people are proud of their personal history. They glorify their past, even when it includes events such as skipping school, taking drugs, escaping arrest, or being physically abused. Psychologists sometimes call this the “sucker to saint” phenomenon—that is, people interpret their experiences as signs of their nobility (saintly), not their stupidity (Jordan & Monin, 2008).

As Erikson explains it, such self-glorifying distortions are far better than despair because “time is now short, too short for the attempt to start another life” (Erikson, 1963, p. 269). As at other stages, the tension between the two opposing aspects (integrity and despair) propels growth. In this last stage,

Integration of death and the self is an important accomplishment of this stage. The life review and the acceptance of death (explained in the Epilogue) are crucial aspects of the integrity envisioned by Erikson (Zimmerman, 2012). [Lifespan Link: The life review was discussed in Chapter 24.]

Self theory may explain why many of the elderly strive to maintain childhood cultural and religious practices. For instance, grandparents may painstakingly teach a grandchild a language that is rarely used in their current community, or encourage the child to repeat rituals and prayers they themselves learned as children. In cultures that emphasize newness, elders worry that their values will be lost and thus that they themselves will disappear.

As Erikson (1963) wrote, the older person

Most older people consider their personalities and attitudes quite stable over their life span, even as they acknowledge physical changes in their bodies and gaps in their minds (Klein, 2012). One 103-year-old woman observed, “My core has stayed the same. Everything else has changed” (quoted in Troll & Skaff, 1997, p. 166).

The need to maintain the self may explain behavior that seems foolish to some. For example, many elders hate to give up driving a car because “the loss felt, for men in particular, is deeper than that of simply not being able to get from A to B; it is a loss of a sense of self, of the meaning of manhood” (Davidson, 2008, p. 46).

Similarly, many older people refuse to move from drafty and dangerous dwellings into smaller, safer apartments because abandoning familiar places means abandoning personal history. Likewise, they may avoid surgery or reject medicine because they fear anything that might distort their thinking or emotions: Their priority is self-protection, even if it shortens life (S. W. Miller, 2011–2012).

The insistence on protecting the self may explain a behavior that many find pathological: compulsive hoarding, the urge to save papers, books, mementos, and so on. In a new chapter titled “Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders,” the DSM-5 now specifies criteria for a diagnosis of hoarding disorder (DSM-5, pp. 247–251). Most elderly hoarders saved things when they were much younger and want to keep doing so. With time, hoarding takes over all available space: Things accumulate because possessions are part of self-expression, and the elderly resist self-destruction (Ayers et al., 2010).

Another self theory is socioemotional selectivity theory (Carstensen, 1993). The idea is that older people prioritize their emotional regulation, seeking familiar social contacts who reinforce their generativity, pride, and joy. As socioemotional theory would predict, when people believe that their future time is limited, they think about the meaning of their life. Then they decide that they should be more appreciative of family and friends, thus furthering their happiness (Hicks et al., 2012).

A slightly different version of the same idea comes from selective optimization with compensation, which you read about in Chapters 21 and 23. As senescence changes external appearance, older adults select the key aspects of themselves and optimize them. This is central to self-theories. Individuals set personal goals, assess their abilities, and figure out how to accomplish their goals despite limitations. When older people are resilient, they maintain their identity despite wrinkles, slowdowns, and losses. That correlates with well-being (Resnick et al., 2010).

An outgrowth of both socioemotional selectivity and selective optimization is known as the positivity effect (Penningroth & Scott, 2012). Elderly people are more likely to perceive, prefer, and remember positive images and experiences than negative ones (Carstensen et al., 2006). Compensation occurs via selective recall: Unpleasant experiences are reinterpreted as inconsequential. People select positive emotions, perceptions, and memories.

For example, with age, stressful events (economic loss, serious illness, death of friends or relatives) become less central to one’s identity. That enables the elderly to maintain emotional health through positive self-perception (Boals et al., 2012). A person becomes more optimistic than pessimistic and is happier because of it.

The positivity effect may explain why, in every nation and religion, older people tend to be more patriotic and devout than younger ones. They see their national history and religious beliefs in positive terms, and they are proud to be themselves—Canadian, Czech, Chinese, or whatever. Of course, this same trait can keep them mired in their earlier prejudices—racist, or sexist, or homophobic, for instance.

Anna Quindlen was quoted just a few pages ago as saying she was glad she “was what I was again.” This trait has both positive and negative implications, as the following suggests.

Stratification Theories

A second set of theories, called stratification theories, emphasizes social forces (1) that position each person in a social stratum or level and (2) that create disadvantages for people in some groups and advantages for people in other groups. Stratification begins in the womb, as “individuals are born into a society that is already stratified—that is differentiated—along key dimensions, including sex, race, and SES” (Lynch & Brown, 2011, p. 107).

Every form of stereotyping makes it more difficult for people to break free from social institutions that assign them to a particular path. The results are cumulative, over the entire life span (Brandt et al., 2012).

For instance, as described in many of the preceding chapters, children who are both African American and poor are more likely to be low birthweight, less likely to talk at age 1, less likely to read before age 6, more likely to drop out of school, less likely to obtain a college degree, less likely to be employed, less likely to marry, and finally, more likely to develop cancer, diabetes, and all other serious health problems. This is true when a child is compared to children of other ethnic groups, and when compared to other African American children who are not poor (see Figure 25.3).

Each stereotype adds to stratification and thus adds to the risk of problems, perhaps putting those who are female, nonwhite, and poor in triple jeopardy. However, you will see at the end of this section that not everyone agrees with that conclusion (Rosenfeld, 2012).

First consider gender. Irrational, gender-based fear may limit female independence from infancy to old age. For example, adult children are more likely to persuade their widowed mothers to live with them than their widowed fathers. In fact, however, men living alone are more likely than women to have a sudden health crisis or to be the victim of a violent crime (5 percent versus 2 percent).

In another example of gender stratification, young women typically marry men a few years older and then outlive them. Especially in former years, many married women relied on their husbands to manage money and to keep up with politics. Thus, past gender stratification led to decades of isolation, poverty, and dependence among the oldest-old widows.

Why do women outlive men? This could be biological, but it could result from lifelong stratification that works against males. Boys are taught to be stoic, repressing emotions and avoiding medical attention. In this way, both sexes may suffer from gender stratification, the men by dying too soon and the women by being widowed too long.

Ethnic stratification also harms people. For instance, past racism may cause weathering in African Americans, increasing allostatic load and shortening healthy life (Thrasher et al., 2012). The fact that health problems result from a lifetime of stratification “suggests multiple intervention points at which disparities can be reduced,” beginning before birth (Haas et al., 2012, p. 238). [Lifespan Link: Weathering is explained in Chapter 21 in the section Accumulating Stressors.]

Past ethnic discrimination also affects income in many ways. Consider home ownership, a source of financial security for many seniors. Fifty years ago, stratification prevented many African Americans from buying homes. Laws passed since then have reduced housing discrimination, but a disproportionate number of non-whites lost homes in the foreclosure crisis that began in 2007. Is this a new example of an old story, stratification causing poverty? (Saegert et al., 2012)

A particular form of ethnic stratification affects immigrant elders. Many cultures expect younger generations to care for the elderly, but U.S. homes are designed for nuclear families. Pensions and Social Security are given to employees who worked for decades, which leaves many older immigrants (without U.S. work history) poor, lonely, and dependent on their children, who live in homes and apartments not designed for extended families and who themselves must contend with stereotypes about immigrants.

Finally, the most harmful effect of stratification may be financial, first the direct effects of poverty, then magnified by gender, ethnicity, and age. As one reviewer explains, “[W]omen…are much more likely to live in households that fall below the federal poverty line. Black and Hispanic women are particularly vulnerable” (J. S. Jackson et al., 2011, p. 93). One crucial factor is past employment. Many of the poorest elderly never held jobs that paid Social Security. Thus, an important source of income is absent. When ethnic discrimination affects employment opportunity, old-age poverty is particularly likely.

Low-SES white men are also at risk, as they are more likely to have less education, worse health, and a spottier work history (more unemployment, fewer benefits, no pensions) than men of higher SES. The current economic crisis in the United States, England, and elsewhere results in less governmental social support for the poor, both old and young (Phillipson, 2013). Anyone growing up in a low-SES family experiences stress of all kinds and accumulates disadvantages that are increasingly limiting as the years go by (Bowen & González, 2010).

The problem may begin even before birth, since epigenetic factors—themselves affected by maternal health—shape genetic expression (Shanahan & Hofer, 2011). Babies born into low-SES families risk late-life diabetes, disability, and death. Obviously, poverty among elders should be alleviated, but mitigating poverty early in life may be critical for well-being in late adulthood (Herd et al., 2011).

Ageism is, of course, stratification by age. Age affects a person’s life in many ways, including income and health. For example, seniority builds in the workplace, increasing income up to a certain point, and then employment stops, perhaps with a pension but never with as much income as before. People who are unskilled or temporary workers are particularly likely to be hurt by current old-age pension structures (Phillipson, 2013).

The most controversial version of age stratification is disengagement theory (Cumming & Henry, 1961), which holds that as people age, traditional roles become unavailable, the social circle shrinks, coworkers stop relying on them, and adult children turn away to focus on their own children. According to this theory, disengagement is a mutual process, chosen by both generations. Thus, younger people disengage from the old, who themselves voluntarily disengage from younger adults, withdrawing from life’s action.

Disengagement theory provoked a storm of protest. Many gerontologists insisted that older people need and want new involvements. Some developed an opposing theory, called activity theory, which holds that the elderly seek to remain active with relatives, friends, and community groups. Activity theorists contended that if the elderly disengage, they do so unwillingly and suffer because of it (J. R. Kelly, 1993; Rosow, 1985).

Later research finds that being active correlates with happiness, intelligence, and health. This is true at younger ages as well, but the correlation between activity and well-being is particularly strong at older ages (Potocnik & Sonnentag, 2012; Bielak et al., 2012).

Generally, happier and healthier elders are quite active—continuing as worker, wife, husband, mother, father, neighbor. They attend concerts, read newspapers, take classes. Disengagement is more likely among those low in SES, and thus may be the result of past stratification (Clarke, 2011). Literally being active—bustling around the house, climbing stairs, walking to work—lengthens life and increases satisfaction.

Both disengagement and activity theories need to be applied with caution, however. Disengagement in one aspect of life (e.g., retirement) does not necessarily mean disengagement overall: Many retirees disengage from work but find new roles and activities (Freund et al., 2009). The positivity effect may mean that an older person disengages from emotional events that cause anger, regret, and sadness, while actively enjoying other experiences. Certainly some elders who never graduated from 8th grade are nonetheless vital pillars of their community.

Women, ethnic minorities, and low-income people may develop habits and attitudes by old age that protect them from the worst effects of stratification (Rosenfield, 2012). Evidence is spotty, and low SES and ill health are harmful at every age, but perhaps gender, ethnicity, or low SES are less damaging for the very old than they are earlier in life.

Both age-related stratification theories—that all the elderly want to withdraw and that they all should stay active—may arise from cultural stereotypes. The particular needs of an older person may not conform to either theory. Similarly, the fact that older women live longer than older men, and that they usually have closer relationships with friends and families, suggests that they might be less disadvantaged in late adulthood than earlier.

Cautionary data about lifelong discrimination also comes from comparing ethnic groups. Although a Black/White disparity in survival and self-esteem is evident for the young-old, it disappears at about age 80 and then reverses. The average Black centenarian lives seven months longer than does the average non-Black one.

Elderly Hispanics also seem to have a longevity advantage over elderly non-Hispanics in the United States. One explanation for this race crossover is called selective survival—the idea that only extremely healthy non-European Americans reach old age. Other interpretations are possible. Perhaps ethnic inequality diminishes because very old age is a powerful “leveler,” overwhelming ethnic and SES stratification (Bird et al., 2010; Robert et al., 2009).