Ageing: 7. References

References for Ageing: posts 1-6:

1. “Age influences people's expectations of future happiness”. in.news.yahoo.com. September 12, 2008.
2. Argyris, Chris. “Maturity/Immaturity Theory”. accel-team.com. Human Relations Contributors. Accel Team Development. 2006.
3. Empfield, Dan. “Aging and Performance”. slowtwitch.com. Slowtwitch.com Coach’s corner. CA, USA. 7.23.03.
   
4. “Exercise Reverses Aging In Human Skeletal Muscle”. sciencedaily.com. Science News. Science Daily. Science Daily LLC. May 23, 2007.
5. Hoppmann, Cristiane A, et al. “Linking Possible Selves and Behavior: Do Domain-Specific Hopes and Fears Translate Into Daily Activities in Very Old Age?” Pp 42-49. Volume 65B, Issue 1. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B. Life Sciences & Medicine. Oxford Journals. Published by Oxford University Press. 2006.
6. Pushkar, Dolores, et al. “Testing Continuity and Activity Variables as Predictors of Positive and Negative Affect in Retirement”. Pp 104-111. Volume 62, Issue 2. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B. Life Sciences & Medicine. Oxford Journals. Published by Oxford University Press. 2009.

Ageing: 6. Flip side of old

In growing older, continuity with past performance standards, even one’s own, is difficult to keep up. In futile attempts to be just as before, older age groups feel compelled to chase the chimera of youth.

The transition to middle adulthood actually begins in the early to mid-forties. The change in era, beginning around age 40 through 65, culminates in ‘senior citizenship’ of their organization, community and society. Elders need to take stock of their self as transitioning in time, and change habits and perspectives in synchrony with their life change.

Studies on ageing have indicated some important correlations:

• Changes in the individual’s activities link to predictable changes in affect. As the number of activities and ability decrease, the negative affect increases. Positive affect becomes higher with increase in activity frequency, ability, ease and future intentions.
• The older the age group, the higher the expectation of happiness and lower the threshold of negative affect and despair with feared outcomes.
• Engaging in “hope-related activities” generates increased positive affect and a higher probability of survival measured over 10-year period.

People tend to overlook the fact that biochemical and metabolic changes occur in the body approaching older age that disprove claims of continuing to be “the same person” over time. With this mindset, habits acquired over years resist change.

Their persisting with past practices in life and work does not repeat earlier successes. Hence, thwarted expectations and ineffective adaptability fuel cycles of negativity and de-motivation. The frustration anger associated with elders is the outcome of the inability to anticipate the onset of ageing, or personally come to terms with its effects.

In issues of health for example, the results of years of neglect begin to show. The body loses its elasticity and energy production is impaired with the decline in the activity of body’s energy-producing “powerhouse”, the cellular mitochondria.

A study conducted to discover the effects of exercise in advancing age obtained dramatic results.

…exercise [in the elderly] resulted in a remarkable reversal of the genetic fingerprint back to levels similar to those seen in the younger adults.

Science Daily reported conclusions by Melov and Tarnopolsky, the scientists who conducted the study at the McMaster University Medical Center in Hamilton, Canada, that exercise (or the lack of it) directly influences the aging process:

The fact that their 'genetic fingerprints' so dramatically reversed course gives credence to the value of exercise, not only as a means of improving health, but of reversing the aging process itself, which is an additional incentive to exercise as you get older.

Yet surveys, conducted on national scale in the US indicate that only about one-third of the elderly exercise regularly. This is less than any other age group, although the benefits of exercise up the age ladder are clearly immense.

Ageing involves passage from one stage of life into another. There is a new reality to adapt to on physical, mental and emotional planes. As in the other developmental phases of the lifespan, the transition can be turbulent. From the developmental viewpoint however, the middle-adult years are the times for consolidation of interests, goals and commitments.

Author Empfield writes about the positive side to ageing, from the viewpoint of a professional sportsperson:

My endurance capacity hasn't markedly fallen off. I've got more patience and wisdom to leverage across training and racing. Most of all, I've got an accumulation of technical and motor expertise that I didn't have as a younger man.

In the t20 cricket league, IPL 3 currently underway in India, for example, players of the old school, regarded as legends of the game, show the way to the youngsters struggling to find their feet in international company. Within the teams that have clicked together, age is not perceived as a barrier across different cultures, origins and nationalities.

The acceptance of this new stage and structure of life enables a new level of stability. Ageing should lead to active changes in roles, like moving from being solely specialist to being a wider-spanned generalist. The older age groups can become strong, motivational forces guiding and nurturing the development of younger, less experienced co-workers, conceptualizing and designing efficient policy, providing thought leadership, i.e., giving direction and sagacious counsel to channelize group efforts.

During this later period in lifespan, qualities such as wisdom, breadth of perspective, judiciousness and compassion also emerge. These are the strengths of age, and the ingredients of effective, fulfilling mentorship that ageing individuals need to prepare for.

Giving back to society the nurturance they may (or even may not) have received in earlier years win them a place in the future as respected role models for the next generation of adults. For the process of self-renewal in the new avatar to be effective, there is need to widen horizon and think outside the box. Expending creative energy in new directions generates wellbeing not only for themselves, but also for the society at large.

Maturity in ageing is to discover the self in others. The change includes taking on greater responsibility for work processes. The conceptual expertise that evolves from experience and knowledge now focuses on mentoring collective performance. The continuity sought in standards is forged across generations, like a bridge that connects the past and the future.

This requires as much objective planning and dedication as might any organizational venture, with implementations in a slow, cautious, and graded fashion. In the critical aspects of ageing performance, self-directed motivation is key. The step-by-step approach to attaining new goal sets would include at each point, the systematic discarding of old, dysfunctional habits or ways of behaving, along with learning and inculcating more effective replacements.

Next…references

Ageing: 5. The established standards

Individuals unite to form groups or organizations with the purpose of winning the fight for survival. In metropolitan societies of the world today, survival is in psychological or economic sense rather than in plain physical terms.

In the process of organizational living, people develop “locus of control” – that is, assumptions about responsibility for events. A person, who has an internal locus of control, operates on the premise that they are personally able to maximize good outcomes and to minimize the bad. Individuals exhibit an external locus of control with the belief that they are at the mercy of fate, authority and other uncontrollable outside forces.

These attributions of responsibility provide momentum to people’s life motivations. The infusion of creative energy enables the achievement of goals generally perceived impossible. Equally, the impetus may fall by the wayside with doubts about individual competencies.

During the last century, dramatic improvements in life expectancy have been achieved in many countries around the world. On the average, longevity has moved from the 40s to the 60s or more. Reasons for the phenomenon, referred to by experts as the ‘age wave’, is improvements in healthcare and living standards.

However, although people are having longer life spans, they are less likely to be constructively involved in work during the later years. In addition, the habits that people tend to carry with them into older age - where their cumulative impact becomes noticeable - have been classified as ‘unhealthy’.

Thus, in middle and late adulthood, people tend to become increasingly unproductive as well as illness-prone (increased risk of heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, depression, bone fractures, diabetes, arthritis, unfitness, etc). Slowly but surely, people appear to give up on life with advancing age.

Many if not most people associate the word ‘old’ with ‘useless’. Having reached a particular age milestone, there is a social expectation of redundancy that leave few options open. Some attempt to extend the visual perceptions of ‘youth’ through surgery and hormone replacement therapies; the majority succumbs to the collective expectation.

The negative mindset on ageing performance is active in standards 'falling' across generations. Within organizations, measures are set against established standards. The ageing individual’s present performance may be of quality by itself, but when compared to these ‘standards’ they may appear to be coming up short.

For people who have grown within the system, the standard references frequently are their own records set in younger days. The lack of appropriate generational role models for the ageing and the unavailability of precedence also factor in the decreasing performance recorded.

It is true that athletes and other sportspersons, for example, show comparatively diminishing speed, ability to recuperate and physiological responses to training with age. That said, it is also true that patience, wisdom and technical expertise that are more crystallized with age, rarely show up in the tests.

Cross-sectional comparisons or even evaluations against one’s own earlier work may actually de-motivate present performance. The individual tends to lose confidence on being compared, believing that despite their unstinted efforts, their present outputs will never be rated good enough.

Some researchers challenge test inferences that differences recorded between age groups are solely the result of ageing. Younger subjects may score higher than middle-aged subjects not because they are more intelligent, but because of such variables as more formal education, better nutrition and greater childhood exposure to television and new technology.

Besides, younger people have more relevant experience of standardized test taking. The higher scores they obtain may then represent generational or cohort effects as opposed to specific effects of ageing. Thus, organizational standards that depend on perceptions of youth and standardized learning, fail to appreciate increased maturity.

Next…flip side

Ageing: 4. Nurture and nature in behaviour

A person’s individuality or their degree of maturity does not develop in isolation or solely because of genetic inheritances. They also require the appropriate environment (system, community, family, organization or group) with which to identify and set standards of behaviour. The nature versus nurture debate on the determinants of behaviour is of course, as yet unresolved.

People’s behaviours are regulated by certain implicit theories of action created and carried in mind. Individual propensities may in fact be modified or altered in the presence of others in the life space, and because of beliefs and attitudes formed in the process of growing up.

The social reinforcements may be positive, that is, pleasure-giving like the ‘carrot’. Or negative that, like the ‘stick’, is fear instilling. One acquires knowledge by observing or entering the social drama, recognizing the rules, and the roles others play; playing by rules and enacting roles others can recognize.

Although theory and action are related, their interrelationship is by no means direct each time. Two differing theories may contribute to a particular action occurring in a particular situation:

• First, the theory-in-use that comprises tacit structures governing actual behaviour. They contain assumptions about self, others and environment built through experience.
• Second, the espoused theory providing the justification of action through the words we use to convey what we do, or what we would like others to think we do.

In fact, there is generally a split between theory (what people say) and activity (what they do) in response to the pressures of social norms.

In the 1980s, Costa and McCrae created the Big Five model of personality traits, also known simply as the acronym OCEAN, which could explain the dynamic interplay. From effects identified in several behavioural actions, the “big five” are:

1. Openness to experience (or openness to ideas or culture): People who score high on this factor tend to be curious, speculative, imaginative and sometimes unrealistic. People who score low on this factor tend down-to-earth, practical and sometimes resistant to change.

2. Conscientiousness: People who score high on this factor are usually structure orientated: disciplined, single tasking and conventionally productive. People who score low on this factor may be more flexible, inventive, and comfortable with multitasking.

3. Extraversion: People who score high on this factor are gregarious, materialistic, and practical; take initiative in social action and in excitement seeking. People who score low on this factor prefer individual work, may be perceived as distant, unapproachable, even eccentric.

4. Agreeableness: Those who score high on this factor are usually people-orientated, cooperative, submissive, and concerned with the well being of others. People who score low on this factor can be challenging, competitive, and also argumentative.

5. Neuroticism (or inversely emotional stability): People who score high on this factor are alert, but tend to think too much of impending danger, with feelings of insecurity and unresolved conflicts, proneness to anxiety, worry, stress, strain and guilt. People who score low on this factor usually think rationally but appear so calm and relaxed as to be perceived as lazy and unserious.

Studies indicate that these dispositional tendencies may significantly change in different circumstances, and thus influence behaviour. They may motivate improving work through learning, affect performance or dominance in social groups, and even contribute to the degree of accident proneness.

The enduring characteristic of personality is not that people behave in the same way in every situation, but that there is a degree of consistency in their approach to situations and contexts.

Next…standards