Successful aging: The role of cognitive gerontology.

نویسندگان

  • Alan Hartley
  • Lucie Angel
  • Alan Castel
  • André Didierjean
  • Lisa Geraci
  • Joellen Hartley
  • Eliot Hazeltine
  • Patrick Lemaire
  • François Maquestiaux
  • Eric Ruthruff
  • Laurence Taconnat
  • Catherine Thevenot
  • Dayna Touron
چکیده

This commentary explores the relationships between the construct of successful aging and the experimental psychology of human aging-cognitive gerontology. What can or should cognitive gerontology contribute to understanding, defining, and assessing successful aging? Standards for successful aging reflect value judgments that are culturally and historically situated. Fundamentally, they address social policy; they are prescriptive. If individuals or groups are deemed to be aging successfully, then their characteristics or situations can be emulated. If an individual or a group is deemed to be aging unsuccessfully, then intervention should be considered. Although science is never culture-free or ahistorical, cognitive gerontology is primarily descriptive of age-related change. It is not prescriptive. It is argue that cognitive gerontology has little to contribute to setting standards for successful aging. If, however, better cognitive function is taken as a marker of more successful aging-something not universally accepted-then cognitive gerontology can play an important assessment role. It has a great deal to contribute in determining whether an individual or a group evidences better cognitive function than another. More importantly, cognitive gerontology can provide tools to evaluate the effects of interventions. It can provide targeted measures of perception, attention, memory, executive function, and other facets of cognition that are more sensitive to change than most clinical measures. From a deep understanding of factors affecting cognitive function, cognitive gerontology can also suggest possible interventions. A brief narrative review of interventions that have and have not led to improved cognitive function in older adults. Finally, the enormous range is addressed in the estimates of the proportion of the population that meets a standard for aging successfully, from less than 10% to more than 90%. For research purposes, it would be better to replace absolute cutoffs with correlational approaches (e.g., Freund & Baltes, 1998, Psychology and Aging, 13, 531-543). For policy purposes, cutoffs are necessary, but we propose that assessments of successful aging be based not on absolute cutoffs but on population proportions. An example of one possible standard is this: Those more than 1 standard deviation above the mean are aging successfully; those more than 1 standard deviation below the mean are aging unsuccessfully; those in between are aging usually. Adoption of such a standard may reduce the wide discrepancies in the incidence of successful aging reported in the literature.

برای دانلود رایگان متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

The role of spiritual health and social participation on successful aging in nursing homes

Abstract Background:. Successful aging is one of the most important concepts in gerontology and is a process in which a person adjusts him/herself to adapt to the changes caused by aging and be independent. Based on a review of related literature, it seems that spiritual health and social participation can be considered as important predictors of successful aging. The present study aimed to de...

متن کامل

The Predictive Role Of Health Promoting Lifestyle In Cognitive Status Of Older Clergymen

Objectives: Healthy lifestyle along with spirituality affect the physical and mental health of the older adults. Regarding the older clergymen’s experience of spiritual life, this study aimed to determine the predictive role of health promoting lifestyle in cognitive status among older clergymen in Qom city in 2018. Materials and methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 190 older c...

متن کامل

Cognitive change in aging: identifying gene-environment correlation and nonshared environment mechanisms.

We describe gene-environment processes that may help account for individual differences in successful aging. Our emphasis is on successful aging in the cognitive domain, wherein individuals come to use a variety of strategies to cope with changes in cognitive capacities. We focus on the role of executive control in particular and define gene-environment correlation and nonshared environmental m...

متن کامل

Age identity, gender, and perceptions of decline: does feeling older lead to pessimistic dispositions about cognitive aging?

OBJECTIVES Drawing on past studies of age identity, this article examined whether feeling older was associated with more pessimistic views about cognitive aging. METHODS Using respondents aged 55 years and older in the Midlife Development in the United States study, we estimated a series of linear regression models to predict people's dispositions toward their cognitive aging. The main compar...

متن کامل

Dyadic interrelations in lifespan development and aging: how does 1 + 1 make a couple? - introduction.

Lifespan development and aging do not take place in a vacuum. It is increasingly recognized that others, who may be very familiar such as marital partners, often play a key role in shaping the developmental trajectories of their spouses. Further, this shaping seems at least partially dependent on the prolonged interactions that result in a high level of familiarity that is conducive to affectin...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

عنوان ژورنال:
  • Experimental aging research

دوره 44 1  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2018