Adults have two principal jobs in life - earning a living and raising a family — and much of life’s satisfaction comes from doing these jobs as well as possible. The man’s work makes him feel useful and other people respect him if he does a good job. In the same manner, raising a family and making a home are the woman’s way of being useful. (more…)

Being in good health is hard enough to come by at any age, but it becomes more difficult to maintain during the later years when people have fewer physical reserves upon which to call and the body takes longer to recuperate from an illness. Modern medical science can do much, however, to improve many poor health situations (more…)

American aging population makes up a substantial social challenge. These social problems will increase significantly over the next 50 years. Single, divorced, or widowed women as well as members of racial minorities are particularly dangerous to draining chronic health problems, poverty, and unmet health and social needs as they are aging. (more…)

Young people rarely worry about their physics capacities. As a matter of fact they take tremendous pride in their physical well being and usually behave as though it were something that will go on forever.

However, by the time people reach middle age certain changes become apparent to challenge this certainty that youthful vigor will last for all time. (more…)

In many instances, the symptoms listed below are the result of relatively minor disorders as elderly. However, they can also represent the early signs of serious chronic disease in older adults, and they should be investigated promptly by your doctor. (more…)

Paul Baltes and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Neurological Research in Berlin further supported the value of education. They examined compensatory strategies people employ as they grow older. The Berlin group distinguished between two types of mental activity:

(1) the biologically shaped hardware of the mind, which operates the speed and accuracy of memory, sensory input, ability to make distinctions and comparisons, and ability to put things into categories (also termed cognitive mechanics), and (more…)

Social cognitions involve thoughts about others and thoughts about the self in relationship to others. When we consider cognitive aging theory from this point of view, it leads us away from traditional research methods and theoretical perspectives that have focused on basic information processing and how it is tied to physiological decline. This body of research has been largely experimental and often has taken place in situations designed to remove the effects of the social context. In contrast, research on social cognition and aging typically is designed to consider how social context affects the thinking of adults. (more…)