Geriatric psychology
The Gerontopsychology or gerontological psychology is concerned with the amount of experience and behavior of the people of the aging is due as well as its ability to influence. As a sub-discipline, it can be assigned to both psychology and gerontology and is a relatively young field of developmental psychology .
This did not establish itself as an independent area until the end of the 1980s, after various empirical findings made it necessary to revise previous one-dimensional development concepts, which assumed that human development would be completed after childhood and adolescence. Research on aging in particular was carried out before, but mainly in the field of differential psychology due to the narrow limits of the concept of development.
In 1990 Paul Baltes published a new multidimensional development concept, which assumed that development did not take place sequentially, unidirectionally and irreversibly, but is characterized by a constant interplay between the growth and reduction of competencies (multidirectionality), which has a significant plasticity. This also implied that the inter-individual development process would take place relatively simultaneously, but should not be of the same character.
The widespread stereotype of the pessimistic, chronically bad-tempered old man lacks any basis for this theory. The fact that everyday events give a different impression is largely due to the fact that many allegedly prototypical properties of older people are due to pathological conditions. For example, the likelihood of developing dementia increases with age, and many diseases of the nervous system only appear in old age, such as Parkinson's disease or Huntington 's disease . This fact alone ensures that generalizations are made across the entire population of older people on the basis of minorities.
Age deficits
Of course, it cannot be denied that psychological and physiological aging has various disadvantages. A study by Cattell and Horn carried out at the end of the 1960s clearly shows that so-called fluid intelligence (memory, sensory perception) decreases with advancing age compared to crystallized intelligence (knowledge, linguistic skills).
In the mid-1990s, however, Schaie carried out a factor analysis of these intelligence-theoretical constructs, with which it was possible to prove that although the speed of perception continuously decreases with age, other competencies of fluid intelligence, such as inductive thinking, only reach their extremes in the fifth decade of life. The impression that emerges that older people tend to be cognitively disadvantaged is probably partly due to the Flynn effect .
The fact that fluid intelligence generally declines in old age was explained in the 1970s by the lack of encoding and retrieval of information. The hypothesis that was to be falsified was that older people in general had problems forming memory strategies for encoding and retrieving knowledge. As Knopf showed in 1987, this was not the case. Strategies were formed in the same way as with young test persons, but there was an inefficiency of use of these strategies, which Hasselhorn & Hager 1993 attributed to a reduced working memory capacity, which was expressed in the fact that the general information processing speed is slower in the elderly.
Another theoretical explanation says that the decrease in performance is due to a reduced cognitive inhibition in the frontal lobe, which appears plausible based on findings from negative priming tasks with older people and accordingly triggers proactive interference with the Stroop effect .
Age skills
However, as mentioned at the beginning, the deficits are not so overwhelming that old people could be viewed across the board as disadvantaged and not beneficial to society (and this has not brought any selective disadvantage despite thousands of years of everyday practice ). Older people often acquire a certain degree of wisdom , which is characterized by post-formal-dialectical thinking and, according to Baltes, contains nothing other than a rich wealth of knowledge in the area of fundamental life issues.
By retiring from professional life and the resulting leisure time, older people can find a new social identity and thus realize themselves . This can help maintain a high degree of autonomy and continue to assume social responsibility. In addition, existing interpersonal relationships can be expanded, but new relationships can also be established and deepened.
In addition, older people often have the regular expert knowledge (expertise), which is fed by content-specific knowledge, personal years of experience and automated routine and consequently ensures clear performance advantages in the corresponding discipline compared to inexperienced young people, which has also been empirically confirmed, e.g. when typing. The principle of compensation through selective optimization according to Baltes is fundamental here .
See also
literature
- Ben Godde ao: Introduction to Gerontopsychology, 1st edition 2016, UTB Verlag Stuttgart, ISBN 978-3-8252-4567-2
- Mike Martin, Matthias Kliegel: Psychological foundations of gerontology . 2nd edition Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 978-3-17-020602-1 . ( Gerontology floor plan . Vol. 3).
- Wolf D. Oswald : Gerontopsychology. Subject matter, perspectives and problems . In: Wolf D. Oswald, Ulrich M. Fleischmann, Gerald Gatterer (eds.): Gerontopsychologie. Basics and clinical aspects of the psychology of aging . 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Springer, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-211-75685-0 , pp. 1-13.