Towards the Postmodernization of Aging: The Body and Social Theory

This article reviews the significance of postmodernism as applied to understanding social gerontology. We begin by looking at the disciplinary dominance of biomedical models to understanding bodily change through later life. We then move our analysis to the lack of theoretical models within social gerontology which have not attempted to analyze or develop social explanations of the body. The article introduces the concept of postmodernism and reviews the work of major theorists who have impacted postmodern gerontology. We conclude by arguing for an interface between social theory and social gerontology by drawing on recent examples of the mask of aging thesis, biotechnologies, and new technologies that impact aging identity and understanding the self.     

人的老化与社会情绪选择理论

当今世界人口老龄化带来的诸多影响日益受到人们的关注与重视,老化研究也逐渐成为心理学家关注的热点。社会情绪选择理论是基于老化问题而提出的一个新理论。总结这一理论的基本假设和理论框架,并对目前有关此理论的实证研究进行了整理概括,最后指出了该领域尚存在的一些问题,并对未来前景进行了展望。     

The courage to be: Paul Tillich's existentialist theology of the cross in relation to Martin Luther

Paul Tillich is a traditionally rooted, yet progressive, theologian and philosopher who sought to bring the Christian message to the predicament of existential meaninglessness faced by modern people. The present article addresses a scholarly gap by emphasizing Tillich's use of Martin Luther's theology of the cross, in order to demonstrate Tillich's theological relevance for today from a Lutheran lens.     

Aging families: The personal, permanent group

Later life families present a very special instance of group psychotherapy with older adults. This paper describes the challenges faced by later life families, including major life events to which multiple family members must adapt, and the increasing dependency of some elderly members. A developmental framework for later life problems is offered as a therapy frame useful to families. Key aspects of therapy process with later life families are also presented. Goals, strategies, structures of therapy, and the therapist’s role are all shaped by the long and intimate history of the members of this special form of group.     

Emergent Values and the Experience of Aging

This study examined the role of values or guiding principles emerging from the life histories and reflections of 111 older adults as predictors of the experience of aging. Participants completed a detailed life history interview in which they described themselves on 10 major life dimensions. They also completed standardized questionnaires of well-being, personality traits, and intolerance of uncertainty. Participants expressed a mix of prosocial and self-interest values in their interviews. Multiple regression analyses indicated that social support and intolerance of uncertainty positively predicted the extent of values articulated in the interviews. Better quality of aging was predicted positively by extent of emergent values and greater well-being and negatively by age. The results indicate that an examination of values provides a unique contribution to the understanding of the experience of aging.     

Psychology and Aging: Enhancing the Lives of an Aging Population

A pressing need for upcoming decades is ensuring that older adults, who constitute an increasing percentage of the population, are able to function independently and maintain an acceptable quality of life. One important concern is the usability of new technologies. Unfortunately, the science that could direct proper design and implementation of current and future technological advancement is underdeveloped and less mature than the engineering that supports technological advancement. We review data documenting age-related usability issues and how psychological science can remedy such problems. We also outline how training principles can be applied to older adults. We conclude that psychological science has much to contribute to the goal of enhancing the lives of older adults.     

The Healthy Aging Group: A Proposed Treatment Model for Societal & Individual Aging Empowerment

A number of unique physical, psychological, and social factors affect individuals as they achieve late life including, unfortunately, societally imposed, and internalized ageism. Women face a unique challenge in this regard, as this “-ism” often intersects with and compounds lifelong disempowering social forces (Rosenthal, 1990 Rosenthal, E. R. (1990). Women and varieties of ageism. Journal of Women & Aging, 2, 1–6. doi:10.1300/J074v02n02_01[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]; Saucier, 2004 Saucier, M. G. (2004). Midlife and beyond: Issues for aging women. Journal of Counseling & Development, 82, 420–425. doi:10.1002/j.1556-6678.2004.tb00329.x[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Furthermore, a majority of caregivers are women, which places additional burdens on this group. The current article proposes a time-limited, skills-based cognitive-behavioral treatment model based on feminist principles that targets the myths and misconceptions regarding aging in order to improve quality of life and decrease depressive symptoms in older adults and their caregivers.     

Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan: Religion and Politics in United States War‐Culture

Abstract : This article digs beneath the surface of American assumptions regarding war to explore the ethical interconnections between national identity, war, and religion. Striking differences emerge between the dynamics of religion and politics with regard to war and peace in presidential speeches regarding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the analysis of war from an earlier generation, encapsulated by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “Beyond Vietnam: A Call to Conscience,” from 1967. Study of this political discourse helps us better understand our own reality in the United States, and the moral consequences of our beliefs about war, sacrifice, the human character, and the identity of the nation.     

注意与记忆中的“积极效应” ——“老化悖论”与社会情绪选择理论的视角

老年人在注意和记忆活动中存在着“积极效应”现象,即对积极材料的加工维持得较好,表现出对积极信息的偏向。社会情绪选择理论从时间的认知评估影响情绪目标的选择来解释这一现象。同时,研究发现信息的加工方式与“积极效应”有密切关联,当控制加工时,“积极效应”出现;而自动加工时,“积极效应”消失。“积极效应”受到时间认知的控制,也受到认知资源和认知能力的限制。目前,随着认知神经科学的发展,利用先进设备与仪器研究老年人认知活动中的“积极效应”有着广阔的前景     

Aging in Grace: The Spiritual Journey of Henri Nouwen

Henri Nouwen (1932–1996), author of The Wounded Healer and dozens of other books, is best known for his religious meditations and his guides to spiritual development. The Dutch-born priest was also a pioneering religious gerontologist. Early on, Nouwen recognized that the joys and vicissitudes of aging were a relatively unexplored pathway to maturity. This article explores Nouwen's increasing sophistication and candor as he probed the dimensions of aging—his own inner torments and hopes, his relationships with others (particularly his father), and his acceptance of life's finitude. The author, who considers Nouwen a mentor, insinuates his own voice into the conversation to highlight the paradoxical extent to which the particular markers of one's journey define a life ultimately give way to an identity grounded in the commonalities of human existence.     

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging and Culture

ABSTRACT— Research into the cognitive neuroscience of aging has revealed exciting and unexpected changes to the brain over the lifespan. However, studies have mostly been conducted on Western populations, raising doubts about the universality of age-related changes. Cross-cultural investigation of aging provides a window into the stability of changes with age due to neurobiology, as well as into the flexibility of aging due to life experiences that impact cognition. Behavioral findings suggest that different cultures process distinct aspects of information and employ diverse information-processing strategies. The study of aging allows us to identify those age-related neural changes that persist across cultures as well as the changes that are driven by culture-specific life experiences.     

Captured in Time: Friendship and Aging

This essay explores the general issues of aging—loneliness, vulnerability, dispossession, disempowerment, fear of death—from a Christian perspective. Drawing on Aristotle and Aelred of Rievaulx, we argue first that Christian stories transform these issues such that we see aging as a gift rather than a threat. Second, friendships among the elderly, and between the elderly and the young, are essential to the church; we need the elderly to tell the Christian stories, to embody the church's memory, and to teach the young how to grow old and die. Finally, we make a few suggestions about how churches can approximate more closely Aelred's vision of a community of friendship.     

The supposed shame of aging female bodies and the saving grace of transience

Where does the supposed shame of older women's bodies come from? In this essay, I suggest that such shame is not a natural response to aging; rather, it is a culturally conditioned reaction to the patriarchal fantasy of female physical perfection. While certain norms and narratives within Christianity tacitly encourage women to pursue this fantasy, there are also resources within this tradition that can help us challenge the stigma assigned to older female flesh and affirm the goodness of bodies that have lived a long time. Simultaneously, aging itself can provide a lens for fruitfully rethinking some central Christian ideas.     

Faithful Aging and the Development of Character

The author tests the kinship of the concepts faithful aging, the centerpiece of her book, The Art of Growing Old: A Guide to Faithful Aging (1998), and development of character, central to James Hillman's book, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life (1999). Faithful aging is assessed in characters from two plays: Graham Greene's The Potting Shed and Robert Anderson's I Never Sang for My Father. Finally, Saussy reflects on the development of character as a theological issue.     

Sufism and Gerotranscendence: The Impact of Way of Thinking, Culture, and Aging on Spiritual Maturity

This essay examines the similarities and dissimilarities between a gerotranscendental person's and a Sufi's view of ontological questions, of self and of social and individual relationships. Using the Life History Approach followed up by thematic semi-structured interviews, I studied thirteen Iranian Sufis residing in Sweden, dividing the interviewees into two groups according to the stage of their life in which they became familiar with the Sufi ideas: those who became familiar with Sufi ideas early in their life (30 years) are called early Sufis, and those whose familiarity with Sufi ideas came about in their later life (>30) are called later Sufis. The study posits that the existence of a cosmic view of self and the surrounding world can be observed among early Sufis due to their intemalization of the Sufi ideas in early life. Regarding later Sufis, we can hypothesize that the existence of such a cosmic view is not only due to the intemalization of Sufi ideas, but also to aging.     

Alcohol intoxication impairs eyewitness memory and increases suggestibility: Two field studies

Two field studies tested the effect of alcohol intoxication on memory for a live interaction at immediate, delayed, and repeated testing. In Study 1 (N = 86), one researcher presented bar tenants with (misleading) questions regarding a preceding interaction with another researcher. One week later, participants' memory was tested again. Study 2 (N = 189) added a delayed‐testing only condition. We hypothesized intoxication to impair memory and enhance suggestibility and explored whether time of testing affected the outcome on these variables. In Study 1, intoxication reduced completeness and increased suggestibility. In Study 2, intoxication reduced completeness and increased suggestibility in delayed‐only and repeated testing, compared with immediate testing. Sober participants benefited from repeated testing in Study 2, but not Study 1. Findings lend support for consolidation and decay theory and suggest that immediate (intoxicated) testing is preferable over delayed‐only testing. Findings provide little support for alcohol myopia theory.     

The Government of Detail: The Case of Social Policy on Aging

This article examines the linguistic shaping of social policy reports and the textual designs through which political rationalities become articulated and conveyed to the public. Inspired by Michel Foucault's work on governmentality as an art of government, the study takes the illustrative example of the American Developments in Aging (1987) to question the use of detail as a compelling technique in social policy discourse. It is argued that the saturation of discourse with detail is both a communicative and a moral practice that situates senior citizens as subordinate and dependent.     

Aging and Language Production

Experimental research and older adults' reports of their own experience suggest that the ability to produce the spoken forms of familiar words declines with aging. Older adults experience more word-finding failures, such as tip-of-the-tongue states, than young adults do, and this and other speech production failures appear to stem from difficulties in retrieving the sounds of words. Recent evidence has identified a parallel age-related decline in retrieving the spelling of familiar words. Models of cognitive aging must explain why these aspects of language production decline with aging whereas semantic processes are well maintained. We describe a model wherein aging weakens connections among linguistic representations, thereby reducing the transmission of excitation from one representation to another. The structure of the representational systems for word phonology and orthography makes them vulnerable to transmission deficits, impairing retrieval.     

21世纪中国老年心理学研究:现状与未来

本文回顾了近40年中国老年心理学的研究成果,并从研究主题角度与美国老年心理学研究进行了比较。发现中国老年心理学主要聚焦于老年人心理健康研究,同时也在老年人家庭人际关系和社会支持领域研究有较为丰富的研究成果。但国内对老年人的认知能力、人格、情绪情感探讨较少,既缺少前沿的基础研究,也缺少对复杂能力、复杂情感等的系统研究。结合中国人口老龄化现实,本文提出了21世纪中国老年心理学的未来研究取向：基础研究和应用服务研究的双向结合,中国文化特色取向,个体-环境交互作用取向和个体差异取向。