Though much psychological research traditionally has focused on problems and maladjustment, recently there has been more interest in positive psychology, qualities that promote personal well-being across the life span. In this section, several of the positive aspects of later life social cognition that have received attention within personality psychology are briefly discussed. These include generativity, ego integrity and coping, optimism and perceived control, and wisdom.
Generativity refers to a concern for and commitment to future generations that is typical of a positive style of adaptation in midlife, according to the ego stage model of Erik Erikson. Recent thinking, however, has called the staged nature of generativity into question. It appears that older adults retain caring for future generations as an important life goal. Research has shown that the use of family stories in teaching the young, and family engagement with the grandchild generation, are nurtured by stronger levels of personal generativity. In turn, generativity predicts more satisfaction and a stronger feeling of having learned lessons in life during the later stage of Erikson’s model, ego integrity.
Ego integrity represents the individual’s capacity to feel a sense of accomplishment with regard to the past and the end of life. Reminiscence is an important function of later life, and appropriate styles of such reminiscence about social life can be integral to successful adjustment and achievement of ego integrity. It is also striking that although there are losses that must be dealt with as people age (e.g., health, physical capacities, and memory skills), they generally report no decrease, and sometimes even improvement, in their sense of life satisfaction. Research suggests that although people may have fewer resources in life, they manage to balance these limitations by being more selective in the life goals that they choose to pursue (similar to findings about socio emotional selectivity described previously). Such selective optimization may help individuals to cope with the challenges of aging.
Optimism is a quality that has been studied in several ways within positive psychology, including the kind of explanations that people typically give for past and current outcomes, as well as the more traditional sense of expecting good things for the future. There is convincing evidence that optimism (vs. pessimism) tends to be associated with more persistence in dealing with problems and with better health out- comes when dealing with disease in early adulthood and midlife. This is likely due at least in part to more positive expectations for the future, including one’s social encounters. High levels of pessimism appear to predict less subsequent happiness and more health problems among older adults, too. However, pessimistic explanatory styles may not be so clearly maladaptive in later adulthood, because they may serve as a more realistic way of coping with life problems over which older adults do indeed have less control. Nevertheless, increasing older adults’ sense of perceived control over their own lives has been shown to have positive benefits, particularly among those in highly impoverished environments such as traditional nursing home settings. It seems that for the most part, realistic optimism and a sense of self-control are beneficial in later life.
Wisdom is a complex idea with a long cultural history, but generally implies some sort of expertise in solving the difficult practical questions of how to live well. Such a skill is, by its very nature, fundamentally social in character. There is a positive stereotype in many cultures that wisdom is a capacity that grows into later life, unlike so many other cognitive skills. Consistent with this stereotype, adults generally judge themselves to have become wiser with age. When objective ratings of wisdom by observers are used instead, there is not quite as clearly an aging effect. This research suggests significant individual variation, with these skills developing into adulthood and then being maintained quite well into later life. In some studies, people have tended to agree on what constitutes wise advice on a personal problem. This suggests that there is some general sense of a wisdom construct, that it is distinct from cognitive complexity, and that it is related to a balance of cognitive and emotional considerations.
One prototypic aspect of wisdom that has been investigated is advice on child rearing. Older adults did not do as well as younger or middle-aged adults on hypothetical problems given to them, but when asked to discuss their real-life problems, they per- formed as effectively as other age groups. Consistent with the previous observations about social context, wisdom is often manifested in social contexts, and interactions among people (even imagined interactions) can produce better performance than that of individuals responding alone. Collaborating on the solution to a problem in later life, it seems, is a useful strategy whatever the nature of the concern.
