LATE ADULTHOOD

• Characteristics of Late adulthood.

• a) Physical Changes: Sensory & Psychomotor Functioning – Vision, Hearing, Taste &
• Smell, Strength, Endurance, Balance &Reaction time.
• b) Cognitive Development: Intelligence and Processing Abilities. Competence in everyday
• tasks & problem solving.
• c) Psychosocial Development – Personal Relationships in Late life: Social Contact,
• Relationships & Health, Multigenerational Family. Consensual Relationships: Long-Term
• Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage, Widowhood, Single Life, Friendships. Non-marital
• kinship ties: Relationships with Adult children or their absence, Relationship with
• siblings. Becoming Great-Grandparents.
• Primary aging
• Gradual, inevitable process of bodily deterioration
throughout the life span.
• Secondary aging
• Aging processes that result from disease and bodily
abuse and disuse and are often preventable.
• Functional age
• Measure of a person’s ability to function effectively in
his or her physical and social environment in
comparison with others of the same chronological age.
• Gerontology
• Study of the aged and the process of aging.
• Geriatrics
• Branch of medicine concerned with processes of aging
and medical conditions associated with old age.
• Life expectancy
• The number of years that will probably be lived by the
average person born in a particular year.
• Longevity
• Length of an individual’s life.
• PHYSICAL APPEARANCE AND MOVEMENT

• In late adulthood, the changes in physical appearance that

began occurring during middle age become more
pronounced. Wrinkles and age spots are the most noticeable
changes.
• Women become shorter in late adulthood because of bone
loss in their vertebrae
• Weight usually drops after we reach 60 years of age. This
likely occurs because we lose muscle, which also gives our
bodies a “sagging” look.
• Vision
• With aging, visual acuity, color vision, and depth
perception decline. Several diseases of the eye also
may emerge in aging adults.
• Visual Acuity
• In late adulthood, the decline in vision that began for
most adults in early or middle adulthood becomes more
pronounced .
• Night driving is especially difficult, to some extent
because tolerance for glare diminishes
• Dark adaptation is slower—that is, older individuals
take longer to recover their vision when going from a
well-lighted room to semidarkness.
• The area of the visual field becomes smaller, a change
suggesting that the intensity of a stimulus in the
peripheral area of the visual fi eld needs to be increased
if the stimulus is to be seen. Events taking place away
from the center of the visual fi eld might not be
detected
• Depth Perception
• As with many areas of perception, depth perception
changes little after infancy until adults become older.
Depth perception typically declines in late adulthood,
which can make it difficult for the older adult to
determine how close or far away or how high or low
something is.
• Diseases of the eye during late Adulthood
• MACULAR DEGENERATION.
• This simulation of the effect of macular degeneration
shows how individuals with this eye disease can see
their peripheral fi eld of vision but can’t clearly see what
is in their central visual field.
• Cataracts involve a thickening of the lens of the eye
that causes vision to become cloudy, opaque, and
distorted
• Glaucoma involves damage to the optic nerve because
of the pressure created by a buildup of fluid in the eye .
• Hearing
• For hearing as for vision, the age of older adults is
important in determining the degree of decline.
• The decline in vision and hearing is much greater in
individuals 75 years and older than in individuals 65 to
74 years of age
• Older adults often don’t recognize that they have a
hearing problem, deny that they have one, or accept it
as a part of growing old . Older women are more likely
to seek treatment for their hearing problem than older
men
• Two devices can be used to minimize the problems
linked to hearing loss in
• older adults: (1) hearing aids that amplify sound to
reduce middle ear–based conductive hearing loss, and
(2) cochlear implants
• Smell and Taste
• Most older adults lose some of their sense of smell or
taste, or both. These losses often begin around 60 years
of age.
• A majority of individuals 80-years-of-age and older
experience a significant reduction in smell.
• Researchers have found that older adults show a
greater decline in their sense of smell than in their
taste. Smell and taste decline less in healthy older
adults than in their less healthy counterparts.
• Reductions in the ability to smell and taste can reduce
enjoyment of food and life satisfaction. Also, a decline in
the sense of smell can reduce the ability to detect
smoke from a fire. If elderly individuals need to be
encouraged to eat more, compounds that stimulate the
olfactory nerve are sometimes added to food. However,
many older adults compensate for their diminished
taste and smell by eating sweeter, spicier, and saltier
foods, which can lead to eating morelow-nutrient, highly
seasoned “junk food”.
• Touch and Pain
• Changes in touch and pain are also associated with
aging . One study found that with aging individuals
could detect touch less in the lower extremities (ankles,
knees, and so on) than in the upper extremities (wrists,
shoulders, and so on).
• For most older adults, a decline in touch sensitivity is
not problematic. And a recent study revealed that older
adults who are blind retain a high level of touch
sensitivity, which likely is linked to their use of active
touch in their daily lives.
• Older adults are less sensitive to pain and suffer from it
less than younger adults .
• Although decreased sensitivity to pain can help older
adults cope with disease and injury, it can also mask
injury and illness that need to be treated.
• Strength, Endurance, Balance, and Reaction Time
• Adults generally lose about10 to 20 percent of their
strength up to age 70 and more after that. Endurance
declines more consistently with age, especially among
women, than some other aspects of fitness, such as
flexibility
• Declines in muscle strength and power may result from
a combination of natural aging, decreased activity, and
disease
• These losses seem to be partly reversible. In controlled
studies with people in their sixties to nineties, weight
training, power training, or resistance training programs
lasting eight weeks to two years increased muscle
strength, size, and mobility; speed, endurance, and leg
muscle power; and spontaneous physical activity.
• Although these gains may result to some extent from
improvements in muscle mass, the primary factor in
older adults is likely to be a training induced adaptation
in the brain’s ability to activate and coordinate
muscular activity
• This evidence of plasticity in older adults is especially
important because people whose muscles have
atrophied are more Likely to suffer falls and fractures
and to need help with tasks of day-to-day living.
• Many falls and fractures are preventable by boosting
muscle strength. The Korean martial art of tae kwon do
is effective in improving balance and walking ability
Cognitive Development

• Intelligence and Processing Abilities

• Some abilities, such as speed of mental processes and
abstract reasoning, may decline in later years, but other
abilities tend to improve throughout most of adult life.
And, although changes in processing abilities may
reflect neurological deterioration, there is much
individual variation, suggesting that declines in
functioning are not inevitable and may be preventable.
• The impact of cognitive changes is influenced by earlier
cognitive ability, SES, and educational status. Childhood
intelligence test scores reliably predict cognitive ability
at age 80; and SES and educational level predict
• Measuring Older Adults’ Intelligence
• To measure the intelligence of older adults, researchers
often use the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS).
Scores on the WAIS subtests yield a verbal IQ, a
performance IQ, and a total IQ.
• Older adults tend not to perform as well as younger
adults on the WAIS, but the difference is primarily in
nonverbal performance.
• On the five subtests in the performance scale (such as
identifying the missing part of a picture, copying a
design, and mastering a maze), scores drop with age;
but on the six tests making up the verbal scale—
particularly tests of vocabulary, information, and
comprehension— scores fall only slightly and very
gradually. This is called the classic aging pattern
• This classic aging pattern occur due to the verbal items that
hold up with age are based on knowledge; they do not
require the test-taker to figure out or do anything new.
• The performance tasks involve the processing of new
information; they require perceptual speed and motor
skills, which can reflect muscular and neurological
slowing.
• The Seattle Longitudinal Study: Use It or Lose It
• In the Seattle Longitudinal Study of Adult Intelligence,
researchers measured six primary mental abilities:
verbal meaning, word fluency, number (computational
ability), spatial orientation, inductive reasoning, and
perceptual speed. Consistent with other studies,
perceptual speed tended to decline earliest and most
rapidly. Cognitive decline in other respects, however,
was slow.
• It was found that very few weaken in all or even most
abilities, and many improve in some areas. Most fairly
healthy older adults show only small losses until the late
sixties or seventies. Not until the eighties do they fall
below the average performance of younger adults. And
even then, declines in verbal abilities and reasoning are
modest.
• The most striking feature of the Seattle findings is the
tremendous variation among individuals. Some
participants showed declines during their forties, but a
few maintained full functioning very late in life. Even in
their late eighties, virtually all participants retained their
competence in one or more of the abilities tested.
• Those most likely to show declines were men who had
low educational levels, were dissatisfied with their
success in life, and exhibited a significant decrease in
flexibility of personality. Participants who engaged in
cognitively complex work tended to retain their abilities
longer . Engaging in activities that challenge cognitive
• Everyday Problem Solving
• The purpose of intelligence, of course, is not to take
tests but to deal with the challenges of daily life. In
many studies, the quality of practical decisions (such as
what car to buy, what treatment to get for breast
cancer, how much money to put away in a pension plan,
or how to compare insurance policies) bore only a
modest relationship, if any, to performance on tasks like
those on intelligence tests
• A review of the literature concluded that the
effectiveness of everyday problem solving remains
stable from young adulthood until late life and then
declines.
• Age differences are reduced in studies that focus on
interpersonal problems— such as how to deal with a
new mother who insists on showing her older, more
experienced, mother-in-law how to hold the baby—
rather than on instrumental problems—such as how to
return defective merchandise.
• Older adults are more effective and flexible problem
solvers when a problem has emotional relevance for
them or when it requires a balancing of strategies.
• Older adults have more extensive and varied repertoires
of strategies to apply to different situations than
younger adults do
• In one study, older adults solved such interpersonal
problems as a family quarrel more effectively than
younger adults. In dealing with such a problem, older
adults tended to “keep their cool” by avoiding the issue
whenever possible and letting others solve it.
• Changes in Processing Abilities
• In many older adults, a general slowdown in central nervous
system functioning is a major contributor to losses of
efficiency of information processing and changes in
cognitive abilities. Speed of processing, one of the first
abilities to decline, is related to health status, balance, and
gait and to performance of activities of daily living, such as
looking up phone numbers and counting out change.
• One ability that tends to slow with age is ease in switching
attention from one task or function to another.
• This finding may help explain why many older adults have
difficulty driving, which requires rapid attentional shifts to do
better on tasks that depend on ingrained habits and
knowledge
• Training can increase older adults’ processing speed—
their ability to process more, and more complex,
information in shorter and shorter periods of time.
• Training typically involves practice, feedback, and the
learning of task-specific strategies
• Psychosocial Development – Personal Relationships in Late life: Social
Contact,Relationships & Health, Multigenerational Family. Consensual
Relationships: Long-Term Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage,
Widowhood, Single Life, Friendships. Non-marital
• kinship ties: Relationships with Adult children or their absence,
Relationship with
• siblings. Becoming Great-Grandparents
• Personal Relationships in Late Life
• As people age, they tend to spend less time with others.
Work is often a convenient source of social contact;
longtime retirees have fewer social contacts than more
recent retirees or those who continue to work. For some
older adults, infirmities make it harder to get out and
see people. All in all, older adults report only half as
many people in their social networks as younger adults
do. Yet the relationships older adults do maintain are
more important to their well-being than ever
• Theories of Social Contact and Social Support
• According to social convoy theory, aging adults
maintain their level of social support by identifying
members of their social network who can help them and
avoiding those who are not supportive. As former
coworkers and casual friends drop away, most older
adults retain a stable inner circle of social convoys:
close friends and family members on whom they can
rely and who strongly affect their well-being
• A somewhat different explanation of changes in social
contact comes from socioemotional selectivity theory.
As remaining time becomes short, older adults choose
to spend time with people and in activities that meet
immediate emotional needs. A college student may put
up with a disliked teacher for the sake of gaining
needed knowledge; an older adult may be less willing to
spend precious time with a friend who gets on her
nerves.
• Young adults with a free half-hour may spend it with
someone they would like to get to know better; older
adults tend to spend free time with someone they know
well. Thus, even though older adults may have smaller
social networks than younger adults do, they tend to
have as many very close relationships and to be more
satisfied with those they have. Their positive feelings
toward old friends are as strong as those of young
adults, and their positive feelings toward family
members are stronger .
• The Importance of Social Relationships
• Emotional support helps older people maintain life
satisfaction in the face of stress and trauma, such as
the loss of a spouse or child or a life-threatening illness
or accident, and positive ties tend to improve health
and well-being. However, conflicted relationships may
play an even larger negative role. A longitudinal survey
of 515 older adults found that difficult or unpleasant
relationships—marred by criticism, rejection,
competition, violation of privacy, or lack of reciprocity—
can be chronic stressors. As earlier in life, social
relationships go hand in hand with health. Socially
• The Multigenerational Family
• The late-life family has special characteristics.
Historically, families rarely spanned more than three
generations. Today, many families in developed
countries include four or even five generations, making
it possible for a person to be both a grandparent and a
grandchild at the same time.
• The presence of so many family members can be
enriching but also can create special pressures.
Increasing numbers of families are likely to have at least
one member who has lived long enough to have several
chronic illnesses and whose care may be physically and
• Now that the fastest-growing group in the population is
age 85 and over, many people in their late sixties or
beyond, whose own health and energy may be faltering,
find themselves serving as caregivers. Indeed, many
women spend a bigger part of their lives caring for
parents than for children
Marital Relationships

• Long-Term Marriage
• Because women usually marry older men and outlive
them and because men are more likely to remarry after
divorce or widowhood, many more men than women
throughout the world are married in late life.
• Married couples who are still together in late adulthood
are more likely than middle-aged couples to report their
marriage as satisfying, and many say it has improved
• The way couples resolve conflicts is a key to marital
satisfaction throughout adulthood. Married people with
much discord in their marriages tend to be anxious and
depressed, whereas those with less discordant
marriages tend to have greater life satisfaction and self-
esteem.
• Patterns of conflict resolution tend to remain fairly
constant throughout a marriage, but older couples’
greater ability to regulate their emotions may make
their conflicts less severe
• Throughout the developed world, married people are
healthier and live longer than unmarried people but the
relationship between marriage and health may be
different for husbands than for wives. Whereas being
married seems to have health benefits for older men,
older women’s health seems to be linked more to the
quality of the marriage
• Spouses who must care for disabled partners
may feel isolated, angry, and frustrated,
especially if they are in poor health themselves.
• A study of more than 500,000 couples on
Medicare found that when one spouse was
hospitalized, the other’s risk of death increased
• Widowhood
• Just as older men are more likely than women to be
married, older women are more likely than men to be
widowed. Women tend to outlive their husbands and are
less likely than men to marry again.
• In most countries, more than half of older women are
widows
• Divorce and Remarriage
• Divorce in late life is rare; only about 11 percent of U.S.
adults age 65 and over were divorced and not remarried
in 2005 . However, these numbers have nearly doubled
since 1980 and probably will continue to increase as
younger cohorts with larger proportions of divorced
people reach late adulthood
• Remarriage
• Remarriage in late life may have a special character.
Among 125 well-educated, fairly affluent men and
women, those in late-life remarriages seemed more
trusting and accepting and less in need of deep sharing
of personal feelings than in earlier marriages. Men, but
not women, tended to be more satisfied in late-life
remarriages than in midlife remarriages.
• Remarriage has societal benefits. Older married people
are less likely than those living alone to need help from
the community. Remarriage could be encouraged by
letting people keep pension and Social Security benefits
derived from a previous marriage and by greater
availability of group housing and other shared living
quarters.
• Single Life
• In most countries, 5 percent or less of older men and 10 percent or less
of older women have never married.
• Even though they are most likely to live alone and receive the least
social support. They are least likely to experience “single strain”—
chronic practical and emotional stressors attributed to the lack of an
intimate partner.
• The reasons may be that never-marrieds have never gone through the
stress of transitioning out of marriage and have developed earlier in
adult life skills and resources such as autonomy and self-reliance that
help them cope with singlehood.
• They also have greater tangible resources: They are in better health
and have higher education and income than those who have been
married
• White never-married women report more single strain
than their male counterparts. Women in older cohorts
were socialized to view the roles of wife and mother as
normative and may face negative cultural attitudes if
they do not marry.
• Black women show less single strain than white women;
with a shortage of marriageable black men, being single
is normative and statistically prevalent among black
women
• Cohabitation
• Older adults are increasingly likely to cohabit, as are
younger adults, but for them cohabitation typically
comes after a prior marriage, not before marriage.
• Older cohabitors have certain disadvantages as
compared with older people who are remarried. Older
cohabitors, particularly women, tend to have lower
incomes and are less likely to own their homes. In
comparison with older adults without partners, on the
other hand, they tend to have higher household
incomes and are more likely to have full-time jobs. In
comparison with both the remarried and the
• Gay and Lesbian Relationships
• There is little research on homosexual relationships in
old age, largely because the current cohort of older
adults grew up at a time when living openly as a
homosexual was rare.
• Gay and lesbian relationships in late life tend to be
strong, supportive, and diverse. Many homosexuals
have children from earlier marriages; others have
adopted children. Friendship networks or support groups
may substitute for the traditional family.
• Those who have maintained close relationships and
strong involvement in the homosexual community tend
• The main problems of many older gays and lesbians grow out
of societal attitudes: strained relationships with the family of
origin, discrimination in nursing homes and elsewhere, lack of
medical or social services and social support, insensitive
policies of social agencies, and, when a partner falls ill or dies,
dealing with health care providers, bereavement and
inheritance issues, and lack of access to a partner’s Social
Security benefits
• Friendships
• Most older people have close friends, and, as in early
and middle adulthood, those with an active circle of
friends tend to be healthier and happier.
• People who can confide their feelings and thoughts and
can talk about their worries and pain with friends tend
to deal better with the changes and crises of aging and
to live longer.
• The element of choice in friendship may be especially
important to older people, who may feel their control
over their lives slipping away.
• Intimacy is another important benefit of friendship for
older adults, who need to know that they are still valued
and wanted despite physical and other losses
• Older people enjoy time spent with their friends more
than time spent with their families. As earlier in life,
friendships revolve around pleasure and leisure,
whereas family relationships tend to involve everyday
needs and tasks
• Friends are a powerful source of immediate enjoyment;
the family provides greater emotional security and
support. Thus, friendships have the greatest positive
effect on older people’s well-being; but when family
relationships are poor or absent, the negative effects
can be profound.
• In line with socioemotional selectivity theory, older
adults tend to have stronger positive feelings about old
friends than about new friends.
• In line with social convoy and socioemotional selectivity
theories, longtime friendships often persist into very old
age. Sometimes, however, relocation, illness, or
disability make it hard to keep up with old friends.
Although many older people do make new friends, even
after age 85.
• Relationships with Adult Children
• Parent-child bonds remain strong in old age. Children
provide a link with other family members, especially
grandchildren. Parents who have good relationships with
their adult children are less likely to be lonely or
depressed than those whose parent-child relationships
are not so good.
• Most older people have living children, but, because of
global trends toward smaller families, have fewer of
them than in previous generations.
• The mother-daughter relationship tends to be especially
close.
• Research indicate that both mothers and daughters held
their relationship in high regard, reporting that they had
• The balance of mutual aid between parents and their
adult children tends to shift as parents age, with children
providing a greater share of support.
• Warm, responsive mothers are more likely to ask for
financial help or personal advice than mothers who were
more dominant or restrictive during their children’s
adolescence and young adulthood.
• In less developed countries, older parents contribute
through housekeeping, child care, and socialization of
grandchildren. Older parents continue to show strong
concern about their children
• Relationships with Siblings
• Brothers and sisters play important roles in older
people’s support networks. Siblings, more than other
family members, provide companionship, as friends do;
but siblings, more than friends do, provide emotional
support.
• Conflict and overt rivalry generally decrease by old age,
and some siblings try to resolve earlier conflicts; but
underlying feelings of rivalry may remain, especially
between brothers
• Siblings in developing countries are more likely to
furnish economic aid. Regardless of how much help they
actually give, siblings’ readiness to help is a source of
comfort and security in late life.
• The nearer older people live to their siblings and the
more siblings they have, the more likely they are to
confide in them.
• Sisters are especially vital in maintaining family
relationships and well-being, perhaps because of
women’s emotional expressiveness and traditional role
as nurturers
• Older people who are close to their sisters feel better
about life and worry less about aging than those without
• Becoming Great-Grandparents
• Because of age, declining health, and the scattering of
families, great-grandparents tend to be less involved
than grandparents in a child’s life; and, because four- or
five-generation families are relatively new, there are
few generally accepted guidelines for what great-
grandparents are supposed to do. Still, most great-
grandparents find the role fulfilling
• Great-grandparenthood offers a sense of personal and
family renewal, a source of diversion, and a mark of
longevity
• The ones with the most intimate connections were
likely to live nearby and to be close to the children’s
• Grandparents and great-grandparents are important to
their families. They are sources of wisdom, companions
in play, links to the past, and symbols of the continuity
of family life. They are engaged in the ultimate
generative function: expressing the human longing to
transcend mortality by investing themselves in the lives
of future generations.