Psychology, 5/e   Wortman, Loftus & Weaver
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Psychology Around the Globe

Life Stages and Elderly People

How do you know when you're old? After all, there are no obvious physical signs that a person has entered old age, unlike the change from childhood to adolescence. The answer may have less to do with age, and more to do with what a person thinks old age is like.

Heikkinen (1993) surveyed a group of eighty-year-old men and women from central Finland about what they thought about aging. Surprisingly, she found that most of her subjects did not feel old. For them, old age was defined by negative factors: failing sight or hearing, pain, weakness, having a spouse die, and so on. The eighty-year-olds who were lucky enough to be healthy saw themselves not as living an "old-age-existence,” but simply living their lives, like anyone else. It may be that older adults in Western countries enter new "life stages," like Erikson's "Integrity vs. Despair,” when they have "old" experiences, not when they have lived for sixty, seventy, or eighty years.

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