Psych 250 Exam 4 – Ch 15 Physical Development in Middle Adulthood – Flashcards
Unlock all answers in this set
Unlock answersquestion
Physical changes - vision
answer
• Accommodation of the eye (ability to focus and maintain an image on the retina) experiences a shard decline between 40 and 59 o Results from a weakening of muscle and thickening of the lens o Leads to difficulty with small print and viewing close objects • Size of pupil shrinks and lens yellows o Limits ability to see in dim light o Limits color discrimination • Reduced blood supply may decrease size of visual field and increase eye's blind spot
question
Physical changes - hearing
answer
• An estimated 14% of American adults between 45 and 64 have a hearing loss • Hereditary and age-related declines • Decline typically starts with a loss at high frequencies • Men's hearing declines earlier and at a faster rate than women's
question
Physical changes - weight and body dimensions
answer
• Middle-aged spread - slowed metabolism - increase in body fat and gradual loss of lean body mass (muscle and bone) • Gradual loss in bone mass and density - makes bones weaker • Disks in spinal column move closer - shrinkage
question
Physical changes - skin
answer
o Skin consists of 3 layers: epidermis (outer protective layer, where new cells produced), dermis (middle supportive layer, gives skin flexibility), and hypodermis (inner fatty layer that adds to soft lines and shape of skin) o Lines develop in 30's as a result of facial expressions o Sun exposure hastens wrinkling and spotting, individuals who have spent much time outdoors without proper skin protection look older than their contemporaries
question
Physical changes - muscle-fat makeup
answer
o Increase in body fat and loss of lean body mass (muscle and bone) o Men accumulate more on back and upper abs, women around waist and upper arms o Large weight gain and loss of muscle power are not inevitable o Weight-baring exercise that includes resistance training can offset both excess weight and muscle loss
question
Physical changes - skeleton
answer
o New cells accumulate on their outer layers, bones broaden, but their mineral content declines, so they become more porous, leading to gradual loss of bone density o Loss of bone strength causes the disks in the spinal column to collapse o When bone loss is very great, it leads to a debilitating disorder called osteoporosis
question
Climacteric
answer
Mid-life transition in which fertility declines
question
Changes in women's reproductive system
answer
• Gradual changes for women over a 10-year period = perimenopause • Climacteric concludes with menopause
question
Nature of perimenopause
answer
• Production of estrogen drops • Cycles shorten and become more irregular
question
Menopause
answer
The cessation of menstruation and of reproductive capacity - no period for 12 consecutive months
question
Timing of menopause
answer
• Typically, between 50 and 55, 50 or 51 is average • Genetics are a key factor in timing; smoking (brings menopause about 2 years earlier) • Not affected by age of first period or usage of birth control pills
question
Hormonal changes in body during menopause
answer
• Reduction in female sex hormones leads to o Decreased elasticity of skin o Risk of heart disease increases (estrogen slows plaque accumulation) o Bones may lose more calcium - risk of osteoporosis and bone fractures
question
Physical consequences and symptoms of menopause
answer
• Hot flash - sudden sensation of heat that comes from the body, usually around neck • Profuse sweating and night sweat • Other changes: weight gain, changes in sexual response, headaches Extent and duration varies extensively
question
Psychological impact of menopause
answer
• Notion that menopause is a developmental crisis for every woman is wrong • May not mark a major discontinuity • Physical symptoms often "minor" • Experience doesn't have to be negative, perspective may depend on personal and cultural attitudes and expectations • Stress may be due to role changes • Emergence to a new freedom
question
Sampsonelle (2002)
answer
• Conducted focus groups with 30 women o Pre/perimenopausal ♣ Perimenopausal = the stage of a woman's reproductive life that begins several years before menopause, when the ovaries gradually begin to produce less estrogen o Postmenopausal • Topics o Defining major phases in a woman's life o Menopause o Differences between expected and actual experience
question
Advantages of HRT
answer
• Less colorectal cancer • Fewer hip fractures
question
Disadvantages of HRT
answer
• Increase in breast cancer • Increase in strokes • Increase in heart attacks • Doubled rate of blood clots in legs and lungs
question
Reproductive changes in men
answer
• Men experience a climacteric, but no male counterpart to menopause • Quantity and motility of sperm decrease from the twenties on, lack of fertility in middle ages • Reduced blood flow to and changes in connective tissue in the penis, more stimulation is required for an erection, and it may be harder to maintain • 34% of US men struggle with maintaining an erection by age 60 • Viagra offers temporary relief from erectile dysfunction and increase blood flow
question
Changes in sexuality for men and women
answer
• Frequency of sexual activity among married couples tends to decline in middle adulthood, but slight • Most adults at this age still sexually active • Longitudinal research reveals that stability of sexual activity is far more typical than dramatic change • Intensity of sexual response diminishes in midlife due to physical changes of the climacteric
question
General health status during middle adulthood
answer
85% rate health as good or excellent
question
Weight (and 3 nemeses but idk what that is so ok)
answer
• Obesity was believed to increase risk of suffering other ailments • Current belief: weight is an imperfect measure of health. Need to consider third factors • One of the more consistent predictors of metabolic health is physical activity
question
Cancer
answer
• Death rate due to cancer multiplies tenfold rom early to middle adulthood - lung cancer (deaths) • Women: breast, lung. Men: prostate, lung • Nearly 60% of people with cancer are "cured" (disease free for 5 or more years)
question
Cardiovascular disease
answer
• Approximately 25% of deaths in Americans ages 45-64 • Silent killer - signs often go undetected: high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, atherosclerosis (build up of plaque in coronary arteries) • Symptoms • Heart attack - blockage of normal blood supply to the heart • Angina pectoris - feels like indigestion or chest pain
question
Leading causes of death
answer
• Cardiovascular disease • Cancer o Women: breast, lung o Men: prostate, lung • Unintended injury Men more vulnerable to death from these things than women
question
Osteoperosis
answer
• Affects about 10 million adults (80% of whom are women) • Magnifies risk of bone fractures, may not be evident until fractures • Related factor - decline in estrogen associated with menopause • Heredity plays an important role • Treatment: doctors recommend a diet enriched with calcium and vitamin D, weight bearing exercise, resistance training and bone strengthening medications
question
How stress affects health
answer
• Stress management can limit age-related rise in illness and reduce sickness severity • Problem centered coping - appraise situation as changeable, ID difficulty, and decided what to do about it • Emotion centered coping - internal, private, and aimed at controlling distress when little can be done about a situation • These coping types facilitate each other although they have different immediate goals • Tendency to cope better with stress as you get older • Exercise also a good coping strategy for dealing with stress
question
Roles of hostility and anger
answer
• Centuries old idea that anger might have negative effects on health • Type A behavior pattern - extreme competitiveness, ambition, impatience, hostility, angry outbursts, and a sense of time pressure • Expressed hostility - angry outbursts, rude, disagreeable behavior, critical and condescending nonverbal cues during social interaction including glares and expressions of contempt and disgust • Expressed hostility associated with greater cardiovascular arousal, coronary artery plaque buildup and heart disease
question
Hardiness
answer
Set of 3 personal qualities - control, commitment, and challenge - that combine together to help an individual cope adaptively with stress
question
Gender and the double standard of aging
answer
o Negative stereotypes of aging are more likely to be applied to women than to men, yielding a double standard o Effects appear more often when people rate photos as opposed to verbal descriptions of men and women o Recent surveys suggest that the double standard is declining - more people are viewing middle age as a potentially upbeat, satisfying time for both genders
question
Complexity of adult intelligence
answer
o Intelligence is multidimensional • Intelligence is composed of many separate mental abilities o Intelligence is multi-directional o Intelligence is characterized by interindividual variation • Patterns of change differ across individuals o Intelligence is characterized by intraindividual plasticity (openness to change) • Capacity for change and improvement is always there
question
Fluid intelligence
answer
• Depends on basic information processing skills: o Analytical speed o Working memory o Detecting relationships among stimuli • Not subject-specific • Believed to be influenced by more conditions in the brain
question
Crystallized intelligence
answer
• Skills that depend on: o Accumulated knowledge and experience o Good judgment and mastery of social conventions • Abilities valued by the individual's culture
question
Changes in intelligence over time (as seen in cross-sectional research)
answer
• Crystallized improves or stabilizes with age • Fluid starts to decline in late 20s or early 30s
question
Seattle longitudinal study
answer
o Design • Cohort sequential design o Measures • Participants aged 22-70 were tested on 5 mental abilities: verbal ability, spatial orientation, inductive reasoning, numeric ability, verbal memory • Also assessed perceptual speed • Started in 1956 - tested at 7-year intervals, with new samples added each time (156, 1963, ...), yielded 5,000+ participants o Results • Performance peaks in middle adulthood for 4-6 abilities, then decreases very gradually • So, intellectual declines start much later • Only perceptual speed showed steady decline from the 20s • Found cohort effects on certain abilities • Steady decline seen with cross-sectional data is an illusion Problems with longitudinal designs: $$$, selective dropouts
question
Education (Individual diff. factors predicting cognitive aging in adulthood)
answer
Those with more education tend to retain higher level of intellectual performance
question
Lifestyle and work (Individual diff. factors predicting cognitive aging in adulthood)
answer
Using intellectual skills helps retain them
question
Health status (Individual diff. factors predicting cognitive aging in adulthood)
answer
• Chronic diseases may account for a good portion of age-related cognitive decline • Physical fitness and exercise beneficial to predicting cognitive development in adulthood
question
Changes in speed of processing
answer
• Speed at which you process information declines • Slower reaction times, slower perceptual processing • Slower cognitive processes in general • Might happen because: o Older adults take longer to decide if they need to respond o Slowing on the brain's communication processes disagreement about exact biological causes ♣ Limits how much information we can take in ♣ Limits the ability to sequentially analyze information
question
Attention
answer
• Studies of attention focus on how much information adults can take into their mental systems at once; the extend to which they can attend selectively, ignoring irrelevant information; and the ease with which they can adapt their attention, switching from one task to another as the situation demands • Sustaining 2 tasks at once becomes more challenging with age • Inhibition - resistance to interference from irrelevant information, also harder with age
question
Limitations of working memory
answer
• Working memory - the processing component through which current, conscious mental activity occurs • From the 20s into the 60s, amount of info people can retain in working memory declines • Attention is more disorganized • Decline in ability to sustain 2 tasks at once • Declines depend on the type of memory - e.g., more decline with recall vs. recognition
question
Effects of aging on speech and conversation
answer
• Difficulties with speed and conversations • Age-related losses in retrieving words from long-term memory • Planning what to say and how to say it becomes harder
question
Prospective memory
answer
Refers to remembering to engage in planned actions in the future
question
Associative memory
answer
• Creating and retrieving links between pieces of information • Deficit - difficulty with this kind of memory
question
Remote memory
answer
• Very long-term recall. Clearer than their memory for recent events Research doesn't support this conclusion
question
Reminiscence bump
answer
• Most recalled events happened between ages 10 and 30 • A period of heightened autobiographical memory • Time of identity development
question
Terminal decline
answer
Refers to acceleration in deterioration of cognitive functioning prior to death
question
Expertise
answer
• Definition - involves having an extensive, highly organized knowledge base in a particular domain - used to support a high level of performance • Nature o Expertise compensates for cognitive decline. Reaches height in midlife. o Expert skills are often more automatic o Expert knowledge often includes rapid recognition of patterns o Experts have better strategies and shortcuts to problem solving
question
Wisdom
answer
• Definition - expert knowledge that focuses on the pragmatics of life and involves judgment and advice on crucial life issues • Nature o Typically believed to reach capacity in old age o Research evidence looking into age impacts, Baltes questioned adults 20-89 ♣ Found age is no guarantee of wisdom Type of life experience makes a difference
question
Selective optimization with compensation
answer
Narrowing their goals, older adults who sustain high levels of functioning select personally valued activities to optimize (or maximize) returns from their diminishing energy. They also find new ways to compensate for losses.
question
Concerns with Baltes
answer
• Highly selected, non representative sample • Most were well-educated • Asked to comment on very brief descriptions of personal problems with little contextual information
question
Grossman (2010, new findings on age and wisdom)
answer
• Interviewed 247 adults - random sample from MI phone book • Asked to read and respond to 3 newspaper articles describing an intergroup conflict • Responses coded for level 9103) of 6 wisdom-related dimensions • Older participants scored higher for each dimension and composite • Study 2 - n=200 - tested again, but with 3 interpersonal conflicts from Dear Abby column • Older participants scored higher for 4/6 dimensions and composite
question
Strengths and limitations of cross-sectional
answer
• Used for much of early work, typically found declines • Can't examine cognitive changes within the individual over time (intraindividual change) • Susceptible to cohort effects that can create an inaccurate picture of the timing and extent of decline • Differences may be due to generational and historical differences related to when the person was born • Consider: changes in education, work and technology, changes in health (cohort effects)
question
Strengths and limitations of longitudinal
answer
• Instead of a decrease in performance, actually found an increase, contradicting cross-sectional research • Convenient for testing in this study Dropout as an issue
question
Cohort effects
answer
• Intelligence/role of education • Work/technology • Health • Largely responsible for differences in research, each new generation experienced better health, education, and professions than the generation before
question
Deliberate vs implicit/automatic memory
answer
• Difficulties with episodic memory - recall of everyday experiences, rise substantially in old age • Attend poorly to context - details of events • Memory difficulties mean that older adults sometimes cannot distinguish an imagined event from one they actually experienced • Limited WM increase likelihood of another episodic difficulty - going to the kitchen and not remembering what they needed • Implicit memory - memory without conscious awareness • Explicit memory - memory with conscious awareness • Age differences in implicit memory are much smaller than in explicit or deliberate memory
question
Recall vs recognition
answer
- Recall: going back in memory to bring out information without an associated stimulus, searching in mind instead of ephiphany - Recognition: a fairly automatic type of memory that demands little mental effort, usually paired with a stimulus to evoke a response of recognition
question
Practical problem solving
answer
Requires people to size up real-world situations and analyze how best to achieve goals that have a high degree of uncertainty
question
Creativity
answer
• Youthful creativity in literature and the arts is often spontaneous and intensely emotional, while creative works produced after age 40 often appear more deliberately thoughtful • With age, many creators shift from generating unusual products to combining extensive knowledge and experience into unique ways of thinking, more often sum up or integrate ideas • Frequently reflects a transition from a largely egocentric concern with self-expression to more altruistic goals • Creativity doesn't decline necessarily, takes new forms
