The better option?

Culturally, we are afraid of stepping outside of comfort zones in Kolkata. We have become conditioned to it. Our trusting, welcoming attitude has led us to misery, grief, colonization and even slavery through generations. So we pendulum swing to the opposite direction. We mistrust everything. 

Fitness may be trending around the world. Not so in Kolkata. Despite the rise of lifestyle diseases like high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes around us, few wish to listen to reason. "No time, no time, very, very busy", many tell me, as they rush to get away. Ignorance, it seems, is bliss. Knowing means worrying, several say. Many, well aware of their unfit condition, hide their embarrassment behind ire. 

Ensconced in comfortable lifestyles, most people don't want their boat rocked. So what if they are a little bit overweight, a little bit diabetic and have a little bit of high blood pressure? Nothing has broken yet, so what is there to fix? A middle-aged man with a prominent midline spread claims he's very fit. The young mother piling on the pounds post-pregnancy, claims she already has too much to do. Thus, lifestyle diseases are left to fester as they will. Until medical assistance is unavoidable.

Generally, it is frustrating to campaign for social awareness of health and fitness in this scenario. Nevertheless, I notice a slight movement away from the stonewalling mindset - among the ageing population. They are tired, they say, of having to reach for meds to keep going. They like the idea of being healthy and active, medicine-free. Fitness fits their happy requirement!

The attitude to middle age

Why tell everybody how old you are? My young European friend is bemused by what he perceives is the Indian obsession with ageing. The West obsesses too, but differently. For both peoples, perceptions derive from the traditional meaning given to life and living - with their modern twists. Tough it is to find common ground between the diverse cultures!

The West is focused on just one lifetime. They must achieve their destiny during it - today, rather than tomorrow, because finally and inevitably, death claims all. With life goals in sight, and limited time in hand, they work long and hard to improve skills throughout young adult life, and play hard as well. It is growing older that then presents problems. The face in their mirror they see changing, harbinger of the imminent, raises fears of the unknown. This is compounded by the tacit social bias against ageing.

They may become preoccupied with retaining youth to remain relevant. A great many go through lengths of excruciating pain repeatedly to preserve or create physical attractiveness, and prolong the fun of life with toy-boys and trophy wives. These seem patterns of repetitive behaviours, experiences of same old, same old, over and over again. The relentless pursuits of pleasure that blur or even remove boundaries between generations cannot and do not, however, change the final outcome.

 

Eastern philosophies, on the other hand, see life as a continuum, stretching over lifetimes. There is no end as such, death merely signals the beginning of a new spiral. There is hence little need to bother with achievements in this lifetime. The preference instead may be to leave matters to fate. It is far more important to build ties in the community, supporting family and lineage.

I try to explain to the Western mind the significance of age in India. It has to do with respect, for and between generations. Age defines the social boundary. Interpersonal communications too change accordingly. It is customary to use the formal form of address in speaking with the elderly. Younger generations bow down with respect before their experience of life, and in devotion, touch their feet to seek their blessings.

 

The traditional practice of community living is inherited from ancient Hindu rites. The individual lifespan is structured into four distinct stages. The first quarter is the brahmacharya, the studentship, wherein boys and girls gain knowledge and skills that will sustain them as they take their place in society in later life. The next quarter is grihasta, the householder, with marriage and living within the family structure, with spouse, children and extended family. Then comes vanaprastha, which literally means to head for the forest - I think of it as detaching from the personal accumulation of worldly possessions and giving back to the community. And finally, the sanyas stage that calls for tyag (renunciation), residing on a spiritual plane in anticipation of being freed of the present, preparatory to moving into future journeys.

The European is unimpressed with my lecture. The shortfalls of my personal experience, probably makes it all sound very theoretical. Furthermore, this common collective structuring is unacceptable to the concept of individual choice. With a quizzical look, he inquires, what about you? He is of the opinion that chronological age should be immaterial. What one feels, is instead more important. If one feels like 27, then that is it, no matter what the actual age is. That sounds a little bizarre to me. He asks what age I feel with.  I can’t say, since logically, if we are to have an age based on feelings/emotions, we must accommodate several other age types as well – physiological age, mental age, psychological age and spiritual age, which together make for more confusion! Because in each, we may be at a different age of being, and hence, which of them is it?

We are not sixteen any more, my classmate from college often reminds me.  She holds that we should not only accept the irrefutable, but also live by its traditions. Act our age and keep our dignity should be the guiding principle. She was a vivacious person in those days, but has since chosen conservatism as her hallmark. In public, she drapes in traditional saris and seriousness, because, as elders, it is our duty to maintain a distance between generations. Seems to me however, therein are elements of self-imposed isolation and loneliness. The elder might cling to the projected image, and pontificate rather than share details about their mistakes in life. Actually, as mentors and role models, they can be agents of change. Genuinely helping others find answers, they gain insight, about themselves as well.

The reality is that the ancient practice of community living is almost obsolete in this country, as self-interest grows more prominent. Extended community ties have faded, and the sense of family shrunk to the immediate household. Neither vanaprastha (giving back to community) nor sanyas (spiritual journey) is invested in. With nothing further to do in life, middle age now signals game over. Ageing parents are accessories to the lives of their grownup children – minding the household while others are at work, babysitting the grandchildren and so on. Senior citizens are apathetic about developing themselves further. Many a breakdown occurs post-retirement from the work or family organization identified with for decades. They give up on life itself, regressing into absolute dependency in old age.

My young friend’s objection to the word old may be its connotative association with decay. Ageing is a factual reminder of our mortality, but what is important is the attitude we cultivate in that knowledge. Overcome with negativity in middle age, we tend to become stagnative. Our fear of the unknown attenuates positivism in life. Our activities become repetitive, ritualistic. We fail to question, to search answers, or discover new fulfilling purpose for ourselves.

It is the attitude that counts. We need to break out of the fearful moulds that constrain us, and find ourselves again.  We need to give rein to our curiosity, to stimulate creative thought, and look forward to the re-experience of “Aha!” moments in breaking new ground. These replenish us; they make us upbeat, and we discover joyous meaning in life and living. Infused with its energy and enthusiasm, no, not at all old, we can be ageless.

Social: 6. Allure of the zero

Women around the world avidly pursue the glamour quotient, for which thinness is an important criterion.  Many women that obsesses over appearance in terror of being perceived dumpy, suffer extreme health issues. However, society more than the women themselves seems caught with the visual effect, signalling at large that the intellectual quality of the feminine gender is unimportant even today.

 

Ostler writes:

…the fact is that when a woman is feted for her fashion sense, the more pressure she will feel to show off those dresses to their best advantage — which means being super-slim. Fashion doesn’t favour natural curves or, indeed, shapeliness of any kind …

Hounded by the social expectations, style icons seem to ride merry-go-rounds they cannot get off of. Beauty salons cash in on the style craze to offer programmes that recreate their attractive body parts in those women not so favoured. Increases in fashion sense  are generally concommitant with their decreasing body weights.

Women in show-business starve themselves to appear more appealing.  They may not eat most foods because weight gains could result in contract terminations. Hence they must hit the gym regularly, and depend on a diet pills to deaden hunger pangs. Other women do their best to emulate them in looks, dress and lifestyle.

Over the last century or so, romantic novels have encouraged escapism their vast feminine readership. Women begin to identify with their heroines and behave in like manner. The push is to choose romanticism over rationality. Medical journals have recently implicated these literature as causing marital breakdowns, adulterous affairs and unwanted pregnancies. In the conscious or unconscious idealization of men, women may abandon their own moral codes, sexual health and competition at work.

The corporate industry realizes that sex sells. Various billboards and glossy publications bombard consumers with stylized feminine perfection. Their aggressive marketing glamourizes sexuality in product advertisements that may otherwise look mundane. The association with the words hot and sexy for women is that more beautiful, more thin, and more revealing in dress attract more popular attention.

Toys and clothes for children under-10 sexualize gender, like with Lolita beds and playboy logos on t-shirts, creating unrealistic aspirations in impressionable minds.  They are surrounded by the imagery of standards that may be personally unachievable – thin, beautiful, and popular. Thus the body dissatisfaction takes root from childhood.

A young teenager, Milly, for example, was a confident, happy-go-lucky child in her parents’ eyes. She was abducted, and only afterwards did they realize that she in fact, hated herself for her looks and yearned for cosmetic surgery.

Carey reports:

… it now transpires Milly had already had a go at slicing into her wrists with a dinner knife because she’d been teased at school…At the age of just 13, Milly was already counting herself a loser in the popularity and beauty contests of life. For girls today, the two are inextricably linked … looks also determine whether or not you belong.

The youthful feminine gender thence begins to associate popularity with the size zero waistline, and gargantuan breasts – just like Barbie, the stylish, iconic doll. The assumption is that otherwise they must fail in society. And society in the minds of the women probably represents the men they have been brought up to look up to for approval.

Barbie dolls that have been beloved companions for girl children for decades, have now been made multicultural. They however, probably perpetrate the social learning of gender stereotypes. Girl children in cultures around the world learn by association to feel disadvantaged to be growing up different from the hot and sexy ideals.

A life-sized model constructed along the famous doll’s proportions showed how dangerous for women’s health the dimensions are in real life. Abraham writes:

Galia Slayen, who made the model, revealed that a real woman with the same dimensions would weigh just 110lb, giving her a BMI of 16.24 - a figure associated with eating disorders … 'If Barbie were an actual woman, she would be 5ft 9in tall, have a 39in bust, an 18in waist, 33in hips and a size 3 shoe.  She likely would not menstruate... she'd have to walk on all fours due to her proportions.'

Women further away from the stereotypical ideal tend to become sensitive about appearance. An email sent to the sales team of a company by their manager may say: If you have a FAT FAT face then you do not need to read this. Now, this jibe could be directed at anybody in the organization, but the feminine gender would quickly assume being singled out for indignity. Men also learn to push the buttons of low self-esteem.

Perhaps a part of the preoccupation with appearance stems from the fear of loneliness in later life, since ageing men reputedly prefer trophy wives decades younger. A survey conducted on online dating patterns, showed that the majority of mature women believe that men of their own or older age groups are uninterested in them, because they are no longer svelte.

McVeigh writes:

…eight out of 10 women over 50 think they have become invisible to men. Seven out of 10 women in the study felt overlooked by the fashion industry, while three-quarters of women in their 60s believed they had lost their identity by being labelled as a "mum"… Because of its 'anything is possible', 'sweet-shop' appeal, online dating just encourages men to cherry-pick their ideal – usually younger – mate.

Male suitors on a dating reality show, for example, joked that the bachelorette in question was an ugly duckling, and needed boob fund contributions.  Similar taunts about puppy fat at school drive many young girls into unhealthy lifestyles that continue in later life. Women are not born with body issues, but develop them over time following unrealistic goals of social desirability. 

Anorexia and bulimia are eating disorders commonly associated with them. In both cases, the very thought of putting on weight repels to the extent that life itself becomes a burden. Essentially, the health consequences of these disorders are severe organ failure and death. Anorexics minimize food intake to almost stop eating altogether. Bulimics alternate between bingeing and forced vomiting. They develop because of the women’s inability to confront reality. 

These disease conditions have been linked to female style-consciousness. Fashion institutions have begun to realize the dangers to social health with underweight models. Some retailers are banning marketing excesses in their stores. Some clothes houses also have now started a new trend of healthier models as a campaign against the potentially fatal eating disorders that generally afflict women, including a host of celebrity role-models. 

However, researchers at the University of Bologna, Italy argue that introducing plus sizes as the ideal would tip the balance the other way. In the industrialized nations, the average already is overweight. In changing the policy on thinness, the average eating habits would also reset towards obesity.

On the other hand, health reform advocates say that the issue of concern is not whether people are fat or thin, but the political incorrectness of both media and industry on the subject. The media blitz of corporate advertising that glamourizes unhealthy standards of beauty and sexuality, sets stage for the exploitation of gender. 

I should think women themselves need to develop a stable identity to make responsible choices, resisting the allure of the zero. Fact is women have been swayed by aggressive marketing tactics, forgetting that there is a lot more to them than just their bodies. They have been unable to identify the strong strand of patriarchal beliefs entrenched in social attitudes that accord mere lip service to gender equality. 

Women demean their own intellectual capabilities, basing social approval on visual appearances. Despite modernity, the age-old patterns persist, of submitting to dominance and awaiting rescue. They need to rethink their concepts, because in narrow definitions of belongingness they set themselves up as no more than receptacles of masculine favours. Women need to wake up to the reality that self-esteem depends not on the external world, but on their own identity.

References for this post:

1. Abraham, Tamara “Former anorexic’s life-sized Barbie reveals doll’s dangerous proportions” dailymail.com. Mail Online. 22nd April 2011. 
2. Abraham, Tamara. “'I wanted to be no one, to not be recognised': Allegra Versace on shunning the limelight after battle with anorexia” 7th June 2011. 
3. Carey, Tanith. “The secret self-hatred of confident Milly shows how little we know of our children's inner lives” thedailymail.co.uk. Mail Online.  26th May 2011. 
4. De Rossi, Portia. “Hollywood actress Portia de Rossi on the disorder that drove her to the edge” thedailymail.co.uk. Mail Online.   8th July 2011.  
5. Hickman, Martin. “Retailers ban 'sexy' underwear for children under 12” independent.co.uk.  Home News. The Independent. 6 June 2011. 
6. “'I'm a great catch!': The Bachelorette's Ashley Hebert puts cruel body taunts behind her for bikini shoot”. Daily Mail Reporter thedailymail.co.uk. Mail Online.  23rd June 2011.  
7. McVeigh, Tracy. “Online dating leaves middle-aged women in 'single wilderness'” guardian.co.uk. The Guardian. 10 July 2011.  
8. Ostler, Catherine. “A waist that made Nicole Kidman look dumpy and why Kate      deserves to be more than just a clothes horse” thedailymail.co.uk. Mail Online.  12th July 2011. 
9.  Rawi, Maya. “Vogue uses three plus-size models for cover in bid to 'battle against anorexia'” thedailymail.co.uk. Mail Online.   3^rd  June 2011. 
10. “Sales manager 'put female colleague over his knee and spanked her' A sales manager chased a female colleague around the office before he put her across his knee and spanked her, a tribunal heard.” Retail and consumer news telegraph.co.uk. The Telegraph. 21 Jun 2011. 
11. Singh, Anita. “Mills and Boon 'cause marital breakdown'” telegraph.co.uk. The Telegraph. 07 Jul 2011 
12. Smith-Squire, Alison. “I was a secret bulimic for 15 years” mirror.co.uk. Daily Mirror. 6/07/2011. 
13. Whitelocks, Sadie. “Forget chubby, keep it slim! Says a new controversial report supporting size zero” thedailymail.co.uk. Mail Online.   21^st April 2011.  
14. Whittaker, Marianne. “The agony of having an anorexic mother” thedailymail.co.uk. Mail Online. 12th May 2011.

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

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