Ageing: 3. The motivation factor

Personality is said to determine characteristic behaviour and thought. It is an important influence in the motivational process that drives the individual towards a certain goal.

The common interest in ‘personality’ has led to immense popularity of different tests identifying them. The tests base on several different theories of personality. For example, the type approach classifies people in categories involving one or more qualities (e.g., the person-job fit theory), while the trait approach tends to cut across situations accounting for permanent and enduring behaviour (e.g., the big five model).

The belief is that in the process, behaviours associated with a particular personality may also be identified, and by extension, their future actions predicted.

However, with the various theories in use, we may be left with information overload in place of the comprehensive understanding of personality. At the end of the elaborate testing exercise, we may be no closer to knowing all the psychophysical systems within the individual that constitute the dynamic organization of personality than before.

The common assumption made has been that personality is static, something that we have inherited, are stuck with and have to get used to. People are wont to say that they are ‘too old to change’ and that ‘you cannot teach an old dog new tricks’ - a perspective now held open to question.

What may be inferred instead is that their motivation is weak. The word ‘motivation’ is derived from the Latin emover, meaning ‘to move’. It refers to the stimulus, the psychological processes that arouse, direct and maintain the goal-directed action.

Theories of motivation emphasize nature (the biological basis of inheritance) or nurture (the social basis of learning). Motives have been classified as primary (e.g., physiological, like pleasure or pain), secondary (e.g., psychological, like power or independence) or general (e.g., curiosity or competence). Operative influences on people tend to be a mixture of these motives.

Theorists have postulated that in reality, personality grows, develops and changes over time influenced by several factors. Argyris articulated at least seven personality changes that may occur in personality development over the lifespan. These reside on a continuum from immaturity to maturity:

Immaturity-Maturity Continuum (From Accel Team 2004)

• Passive ------------------------------Active
• Dependence -------------------------Independence
• Behave in few ways -----------------Capable of behaving in many ways
• Erratic shallow interests ------------ Deep and strong interests
• Short term perspective ------------- Long term perspective (past & future)
• Subordinate position ----------------Equal or superordinate position
• Lack of awareness of self ----------- Awareness and control of self

It may be argued that the direction of movement of personality change on this continuum may not be constrained in one direction only, i.e., from immaturity to maturity. Depending on the motivating factors, the change may just as well proceed from maturity towards immaturity with advancing age as defence mechanisms against increasingly challenging situations.

In any case, individuals are active, constructive processors of information, continually organizing, summarizing and accounting for their own behaviour. Schemas are cognitive representations based upon experience and specific events in life. Their usefulness is that they influence input and output of information quickly and efficiently.

In consequence to various schemas built and stored in memory over the years, people develop mental maps not only with respect to themselves and similarly to others, but also with regard to how to act in various situations. This involves the way they plan, implement and review interactions.

These maps actively guide people’s conduct, although all this is not always done with conscious awareness. On the downside, once established and experientially consolidated, the schemas become increasingly resistant to change.

Next…nurture and nature

Ageing: 2. Maturity in growing older

Later age is often associated with a ‘second childhood’ that is devoid of the energy and vigour characteristic of the initial stages of life. In societies focused on youth, to get older is equivalent to the lack of productivity and redundancy.

Recent research findings however, have suggested that although some aspects of intelligence may develop only until young adulthood, intellectual development continues into later adulthood. Age and maturity may have some positive correlation after all!

Some cognitive skills such as wisdom and expertise in living may not even appear until mid or late adulthood. Especially in a rapidly changing world, adaptability is a learning process that continues over time.

In the attempt to integrate the differing perceptions, theorists hypothesize two patterns of intelligence that appear to show definitive age-related differences – fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence.

Younger people are better at "fluid intelligence" that relates to abilities such as perceiving relationships among stimulus patterns (such as in putting puzzles together), drawing inferences and comprehending their implications. This component of intelligence represents reasoning, abstraction, and problem solving independent of formal training and socialization within a culture.

"Crystallized intelligence", which older people seem to master, includes such abilities as vocabulary, general information, social judgement, reasoning ability related to formal logic, and mechanical knowledge such as the use and understanding of tools. Crystallized intelligence is associated with the use of principles common to the culture in which one lives, and times of a person’s life course.

This means that rather than to decline per se in intelligence, the pattern of thought tends to change from youth to old age. Younger people train their perceptions outwards - exploring, understanding and interacting with people and objects in the universe around them. Perhaps the burden of experience in older age prompts perceptions to turn inwards, and individuals are more concerned with consolidating their positions in society than with breaking new ground.

The evaluations of the quality of creative work of recognized artists and scientists have found that they generally made fewer high-quality creative contributions as they became older. Creative breakthroughs were more often the work of young adults.

The decline in the creative contributions of older people has been related to two variables – divergent thinking and preference for complexity. The general dip in productivity across the lifespan for people in organized society may also be attributed to the stereotypical influence of these two variables.

"Divergent thinking" refers to originality of thought, and the ability to think outside the box. Individuals comfortable with this mode of thinking, visualize many ideas appropriate to a situation. They work with patterns of elements laterally, changing or transforming them from one state to another. This is especially useful for designer solutions in problem solving.

The "preference for complexity" in abstract thought and complex ideas has been equated with creativity itself. The complexity develops from immersing in a wide-based knowledge platform. Its power is in producing something entirely new and unusual from elements that already exist, simply by using them in a novel way.

The saying “to old to change” is perhaps meant to justify the falling off in the quality of work in middle age. There is safety in the familiar and resistance to stepping outside comfort zones. People tend to prefer emotional stability to transforming concepts and reputations in the later parts of their lifespan. Security and dependable companionships are generally more valued by the older age groups than leaps of faith into the unknown.

The fear of the future correlates negatively with the individual sense of time left in hand to make a mark in the world. The less one can look forward to, the greater the motivation to settle with preserving what has already been achieved by holding onto the past and recycling ‘best practice’. The active power to destroy and recreate thus becomes the prerogative of youth.

Next…motivation

Ageing: 1. Fear of the future

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it,you've got to start young.

Fred Astaire

Thinking old age, few people think positively. That future is looked upon as a nemesis cloaked in darkness, causing fear, anger and despair.

My mother invariably wished the bureaucrats she came in contact with, a very long life. Not because she valued their contribution to the world, but because she didn’t take to their patronizing attitudes towards the elderly. She felt they richly deserved to suffer at length the retiree travails they seldom empathized with while in service. Obviously, for her too, old age was a condition difficult to come to terms with.

Old age takes its own sweet time to arrive. The individual rates of physical decline are not identical. Partly determined by heredity, partly by the environment and partly by life experiences, it may even vary considerably. The physical change, is perhaps the most shocking and unacceptable for those used to being admired for beauty.

The

older-looking

individuals are envious of peers who appear to have retain the precious

physical attributes

of youth. Remember the book “The young Diana”? The novel, written by Marie Corelli in 1918, portrays “an experiment of the future” whereby scientific experimentation transforms an intelligent but disfavoured elderly woman into a young and beautiful girl.

Marion Davis played the lead role in the film version. Diana never had a beau in her early years. Subsequent to the age-reversing experiment however, all the men she meets are bedazzled and compete to possess her

ethereal beauty -

including the scientist who ‘created’ her

. The women hate her appearance, and fearing comparisons, even her once-pretty best friend, shuns her company.

The book is of course a work of fantasy.

There is for everybody, a slow and steady biological decline from young adulthood onwards. Secretion of hormones largely responsible for building a physically strong body is on the wane – like, the growth hormone, androgens, and estrogens.

In the almost hundred years since Corelli’s fictional story was published, the preoccupation with youth has changed little. The craze for cosmetic surgery, botox, and replacement hormone therapy shows the desperate attempts, with scientific and technological advancements, to find a cure for the malady of old age, or at least to stave off the helplessness and hopelessness perceived inevitable.

In common knowledge, maturity (or wisdom) comes with age. It is presumed that the direction of movement on the immaturity-maturity continuum is indeed relative to age. It proceeds in a set pattern from childhood to adulthood. “Wisdom teeth” therefore do not appear along with the milk teeth, but are markers of mature development.

In more recent times, it is routine to extract these orthodontic “signs” of wisdom in sacrifice to glamour. They are now perceived redundant in the acquisition of maturity and in digestion. Many, especially youth, argue that the direction of human development is not necessarily unidirectional, i.e., only towards increasing age. There is equal probability consequent to growing older, of people proceeding towards the immaturity end.

Maturity actually relates more with the mind than with the physical appearance. The important factor is neural plasticity. This underlies a variety of processes, including development, learning and memory, and recovery from injury.

It persists throughout the lifespan, although evidence suggests that this plasticity may be reduced in ageing. For instance, the behavioral effects of moderate head injuries are more pronounced in aged patients. Similarly, ageing prolongs the behavioral consequences of trauma.

What causes the change in neural plasticity? Not age, but interestingly, stress has been identified as causing considerable damage to neural tissues mainly through the effects of associated hormones. The neurotransmitter systems and brain structures that are altered by stress have been implicated in a variety of disorders.

Even worrying about the future can lead to stress. Stress feeds on itself, releasing hormonal cascades that simultaneously influence body and mind. The individual is physically debilitated with an increasingly depressed immune system. Fears of the environment and of change are common psychological responses. The effects of stress are cumulative, assuming disease-like conditions in the long term generally associated with ageing.

Next…maturity