1. Adulthood and Aging
Module 6

2. Facts and Falsehood?
The timing of social events—such as getting a driver’s license, marriage, and having children– remains relatively consistent across different cultures.
Menopause creates significant psychological problems for women.
People who live to age 80 have brains that weight 5 percent less than their brains did when they were teenagers.
Elderly people can do just as god on a multiple-choice test as people in their 40s.
The ability to remember facts increases with age.
The “empty nest” phenomenon brings about more happiness than sadness.
Men are 5 times more likely to suffer through the death of a spouse than a women.

3. Periods of Adulthood Early Adulthood Middle Adulthood Late Adulthood
Approximate Age Brackets
Early Adulthood
Middle Adulthood
Late Adulthood
20-35
36-64
65 and over

4. Early Adulthood

5. Early Adulthood
Social Clock: the culturally preferred timing of social events such as marriage, parenthood, and retirement.
Emerging Adulthood

6. Physical Changes

7. Early Adulthood Performance Peaks
Reaction time
Sensory awareness
Cardiac output
Most of they physical abilities will top out sometime during your twenties

8. Middle Adulthood
How do different cultures welcome the outward signs of getting older?
Menopause: the time of natural cessation of menstruation, also refers to the biological changes a woman experiences as her ability to reproduce declines.
45-55 years of age
Does not make most women depressed or irrational
Women are no more or no less depressed than women who are not experiencing this change.

9. Latter Adulthood
Our sight, smell, and hearing usually begin a steep decline once we hit age 65
The corneas and lenses become less transparent, letting in only about 30 percent of the light that enters our eyes.
Muscles strength and stamina also diminish
Bodies take longer to heal after injury
Slows down travel on the neural path
Portions of the brain start to atrophy, or waste away
If you live to be 80, your brain will weigh 5 percent less than it does now
Remaining physically and mentally active will compensate for lost brain cells and neural connections
Exercise appears to foster brain cell development while helping prevent heart disease and obesity.

10. Diseases Related to Aging
Alzheimer’s disease: A progressive and irreversible brain disorder characterized by gradual deterioration or memory, reasoning, language, and finally, physical functioning.
3% of the worlds population develops by age 75
Senile Dementia: the mental disintegration that accompanies alcoholism, tumor, stroke, aging, and most often, Alzheimer’s disease.

11. “Can’t teach an old dog new tricks” or “Never too late to learn”
Cognitive Changes
“Can’t teach an old dog new tricks” or “Never too late to learn”

12. Memory Younger adults have better recall
Recognition remains stable from 20 to 60
Older people maintain the ability to remember meaningful materials, while losing the skills necessary to remember meaningless information
Habitual tasks and time-oriented tasks are also more challenging for older adults

13. Memory

14. Intelligence
Fluid Intelligence: one’s ability to reason speedily and abstractly
tends to decrease during late adulthood.
Crystallized Intelligence: one’s accumulated knowledge and verbal skills
tend to increase with age.
Novelists, historians, and philosophers tend to produce there best work in their forties, fifties, and sixties and later, whereas mathematicians and scientists often do their most creative work in their twenties and thirties.

15. Intelligence

16. Social Changes

17. Life’s Commitments
Sigmund Freud said it best, when he wrote that the healthy adult is one who can work and love.

18. Work Most first- or second-year college students
Change their initial major field of study
Cannot accurately predict the careers they will have later in life
Change careers after entering the work force
Post-college employment is often unrelated to college major
Work that is challenging, provides a sense of accomplishment, and fits your interests is most like to hit the happiness target

19. Love Commitment, devotion, intimacy, attachment
Vital to a happy adulthood
Love last longer and is most satisfying when marked by
Intimate self-disclosure
Shared emotional and material support
Similar interests and values

20. Love Ninety percent of our population gets married at least once
Critical ingredient to marriage is mutual respect
Respect: View others as important people , paying attention to them and seeing their ideas, abilities, needs, and wants as meaningful and worthwhile.
Marriage most likely to last if
Both members are over 20
Have a stable income from good employment
Dated a long time before getting married
Are well educated
Divorce rate in the U.S. is around 50 %
Three out of four who divorce will marry a second time
The divorce rate for hose who lived together prior to marriage is higher than for coupes who did not live together.
Marriages last when each partner compliments, hugs, and smiles five times more than he or she insults or criticizes.

21. Love
Raising a child requires a serious investment of time, money, and emotion, which can exact a heavy toll on a couple’s satisfaction with each other.
Parents who make the effort to spread the work load more evenly can anticipate a double reward:
A more satisfying and successful marriage
Better parent-child relationships with both parents

22. “empty nest”
The empty-nest phenomenon brings more happiness than sadness.

23. Late Adulthood
Gerontology: the branch of psychology that studies the aging process and the problems of older people.

24. Dying and Death
Thanatology: the study of death and the methods of coping with it.
One spouse out lives the other, a grief suffered 5 times more often by women than by men.
Reactions to death vary from culture to culture
There is no evidence to support the idea that we progress through predictable stages.
Anger, denial, acceptance
Some grieve briefly while others grieve for months or years