- 60% involve young adults

- 40% involve middle-aged

- 40% of middle-aged have divorced

- 35 for men

- 33 for women

- High economic development

- Low social integration

- Changing social institutions

- Laws allowing divorce

- Religious beliefs

- Women in the labor force

- High ratio of women to men

How many adults nowadays have divorced?

- In 1945 at 3.5/1000

- 1980 at over 5/1000 (peak)

What are the chances of divorce per years of marriage?

- 1 year = 50%

- 3 years = 47%

- 6 years = 39%

- Parents divorced

- Under 21

- Family opposed to marriage

- Cohabitation

- Previous divorces

- Little homogamy

- Pre-marital pregnancy

- Financial stress

- Different plans regarding children

- Lack of communication

- Lack of togetherness

- Emotional/physical abuse

- Affairs

- Substance abuse

- Conflicting personalities

- Equal income - not financially obligated to each other

- No children

- Teenager

- Parents divorced

- Don't attend religious services

- No sense of commitment 

- 49% of smokers divorce vs. 30% of non-smokers

- Studies say it helps, but couples who go are more religious and committed already

- 20% decide not to marry

- 2/3 women

- 6% initiated jointly

- Communication problems

- Infidelity

- Fighting 

- Emotional abuse

- Fall out of love

Colasanto & Shriver

- 50% personality differences

- 17% infidelity

- 16% drug/alcohol abuse

- Communication problems

- Basic unhappiness

- Incompatibility

- Finances

- Sex

- Infidelity

- In-laws

1. Abuse

2. Different lifestyles

3. Cheating

- Defensiveness

- Criticism

- Stonewalling

- Sarcasm

1. Emotional divorce

2. Legal divorce

3. Economic divorce

4. Co-parental divorce

5. Community divorce

6. Psychic divorce

Leaver:

- Guilt, responsibility, righteousness

Left:

- Rejection, hope, hurt

- Lose more days at work

- More auto accidents

- Depression

- Suicide

- Feelings of failure, loneliness

- Women react worse than men

What is the process for divorce?

- No need to prove grounds for wanting it

- Draw up/serve divorce papers

- Judges generally don't deny

- Hard for other part to stop process

- With children - mediation session necessary

- Half of all weddings involve previously divorced person 

- Avg time between divorce and wedding = 3 years

- Younger people remarry faster

What is different about second marriages?

- History

- Short courships

- Cohabitation

- Less optimism of family and friends

- Children involved

- More communication

- Consists of the people who journey with us through life

- Women have larger inner circles

- Middle-aged have larger convoys

- Why people spend time with who they do

3 goals:

1. Seek information

2. Maintain/develop sense of self

3. Seek pleasure/comfort

- As we age we seek comfort rather than knowledge

- Declines for the first 20 years then rises

- Divorce unlikely in mid-life

- Energy limitations

- Multiple roles add role conflict and overload

- Energy control

- Benefit from multiple roles - the happiest people tend to have more roles

- Evidence conflicts on whether or not being in the middle is emotionally taxing or beneficial

- The degree to which a role is the SOURCE of a person's identity

- People will view their role as caregivers differently and experience different types of stress because of this

- Views caregiving as a result of interdependence in families

- We need to expect to give care to family

- "Valued elder" role

- Immortality - cultural continuity

- Observe grandchildren

- Indulgence

Distant Figure type of grandparent

- Contact disrupted

- Maternal grandparents become MORE involved during and right after divorce

- If mother remarries, even less paternal grandparent involvement

- If no FORMAL custody, hard to get insurance, pay bills, etc.

- Family and Medical Leave Act doesn't apply to grandparent-grandchild relations

- Children living with grandparents are more rebellious (usually male)

- Adolescence: 10 years

- Young adulthood: 20 years

- Middle age: 25 years

- Old age: 30-40 years (mid-60's on)

What does the saying "our world is graying" mean?

- We have 35 times the amount of people over 65 as compared to 100 years ago

- 25% of our population by the year 2050

- Japan has greater amount

- In terms of income, the elderly as a group are not typically living in poverty

- Poverty rates are the lowest for this group in the US

- Usually involves women living alone (AA and Latina women in their 80's and 90's)

- Elderly people have most varied financial conditions

Primary aging

Secondary Aging

- The results of DISEASE, ABUSE, and DISUSE

- Often unavoidable

- The # of years someone is free from debilitating disease and impairment

- Japan has longest = 85 for women

- Increasing slower now

- USA's = 77.6 years

- Our infant mortality rates are higher than some other industrial countries

- Luck

- Genetics (APOE gene = good)

- Lifestyle

- As you age odds of surpassing

expectancy increase

- Avg for all races = 80

- Women may be less vulnerable to some diseases

- Estrogen protects

- Fewer environmental hazards

- Seek health care

- Better health habits

- Smoke less

- More intimate social network

- "Aging by design"

- After genes passed on, no evolutionary pressure to live longer so bodies begin to deteriorate

- Hayflick did study showing that each time DNA splits, strands shorten and leave a gap called the Telomere.

- "death clock" = even without disease, our bodies would stop working

- The amount of maximum cell divisions possible

- Some think has evolved as a way of preventing cancerous changes that might make the cell division go haywire.

- Biological clock is regulates by these hormones

- Hormone receptors in cells that "catch" hormones tend to be less available or effective as we age

- Drop in female hormones and the human growth hormone

- Stress hormone become harder to get rid of

- Antibodies decline because our thymus gland shrinks

- Have fewer immature "T" cells which learn to fight off new diseases

- "Self" proteins change and can look foreign and be attacked - OVERACTIVE IMMUNE SYSTEM or

AUTO-IMMUNITY

Error-Catastrophe Theory for Aging

or

Somatic Mutation Theory for Aging

- Becomes hard to repair errors in cells

- Bodies age as a result of accumulated damage

- "Random errors" get multiplied

- Free radicals are highly unstable because they carry and UNPAIRED ELECTRON and BOND READILY WITH OTHER MOLECULES

- Linking onto others destroys fats, proteins and DNA

- SUPEROXIDE DISMUTASE is normally produced to stop this, but only stops 99% - builds up eventually

- "Cellular garbage" - Wastes accumulate

- Reasoning for the arrival of anti-oxidant vitamins

- Oxidative stress inducing cell death

- Produces protein that tells cell to self-destruct because of free radicals

- IS A PRE-PROGRAMMED THEORY OF FREE RADICALS

- If we lived at a slower pace, we'd live longer

- Exposes us to less "cellular garbage" by slowing metabolism

- Not a lot of support for this

1. Cancer

2. Heart disease

1. Accumulation of poor habits

2. Immune system falters

3. Genotype - process can be triggered more readily in some

- Men: Prostate

- Women: Breast

- BUT lung cancer kills more people than both

- Humans overbuilt with RESERVE ORGANS needed to help cope in times of stress

- DECLINE later in life

- Proteins and cells bind together inappropriately

- Flexibilty decreases

- Eyes cloud

- Skin hardens

- Wake up more

- Harder to get into REM cycle

- Morning person

1. Loss of strength and stamina

2. Loss of dexterity because of arthritis

3. Loss of sense of balance

- Arthritis (50%)

- Hypertension (35%)

- Heart disease (31%)

- Osteoporosis 

- Constipation (10%)

- Sinustis 

- Shrinkage by 5 - 20%

- Loss of dendrites

- Hippocampus loses 20% of neurons

- Lower blood supply to brain

- Plasticity

- Processing of new information, speed, and motor skills are most affected in old age

- Crystallized knowledge - least

- Many people show no decline at all

- Declines mostly in stressful circumstances and unfamiliar tasks

- Selective optimization with compensation

- Variation with people of the same age

- Poor performers were people who were developing illnesses

- Satisfied

- Flexible

- Free of diseases

- Wealthier

- Better educated

- Stable marriages

- Leading a stimulated life

1. Selective loss of subjects

2. Practice effect

- Short: Sensory and Working

- Long:

Procedural (implicit/how to golf) - doesn't change

Episodic (specific events/new information) - most decline

Semantic (words/facts) - may increase

- Related to 'practical' knowledge

- Moral aspect - balances conflicting interests

- Value judgments

- Expertise in fundamentals of life

- Understandings about life's conduct and meaning

- Sleep disturbances

- Appetite disturbances

- Low energy

- Inability to concentrate

- Difficulty making decisions

- Excess emotion

- Declining neurotransmitters

- Medication

- Social factors - losing friends

- Loss of control

- Global term describing diseases where thought and behavior are impaired

- Incidences rise as age does

- Series of small strokes

- Discontinuous

- 5-10% of dimentia

- More common in males than females before 75

1. No memory problems

2. Mild forgetting

3. Noticeable recent memory problems

4. Moderate mem decline/personality changes

5. Loss of time and date/distant events

6. Loss of recent events/surroundings - wanderings

7. Motor skills lost

- Changes in hippocampus and entorhynal cortex

1. Amyloid: APP gets processed inappropriately and forms clumps which destroy nerve functions

2. Tau: Deformed Tau protein which merge with the neurofiber tangles in brain

3. Inflammation: People taking anti-inflammatory drugs have a lower incidence

4. Vascular: People taking drugs to lower cholesterol have lower incidence

- ApoE-4: predicts late onset

- ApoE-3:protects against

- Not related: Aluminum, mercury

- Reduced risk: greater education, use of NSAIDS or anti-oxidants

- Risk factors: High blood pressure, stroke, brain inflammation, infection, folic acid deficiency, smoking, decreased social activity

- Cholinesterase inhibitors help

- Mematine helps

- Medication to reduce agitation and improve sleep

- Extroversion

- Usefulness/competence

- Trust

- Low neuroticism

1. Problem-focused: Doing things to try to fix the problem (lists/suggestions)

2. Emotion-focused: Fixing the way we think about the problem (support group/do nothing/find something else/accept responsibility)

Ego Integrity vs. Despair

- Coming to terms with who we are, what we've done and what we haven't done,

- If completed, we gain wisdom

1. Broader self-definition vs. preoccupation with work roles

2. Transcendence of the body vs. preoccupation with the body

3. Transcendence of the ego vs. preoccupation with the ego

- Takes energy

- Female population begins to dominate making it harder for males

- Homogeneity bias

1. Strong economy

2. Widespread pension system

- Created when poverty was high

- People not expected to live long

- Today provides less than half of the average retiree's income

1. Family-focused lifestyle

2. Balanced investment lifestyle

3. Serious leisure lifestyle

- ADL's: Activities of daily living (bathing, brushing teeth, etc.)

- IADL's: Instrumental activities of daily living (driving, shopping, cooking)

1. Amenity Move: warmer climate, after retirement, may be seasonal

2. Kinship Migration: Closer to children, hard to manage independent household

3. Institutional Migration: Occurs late in old age with advancing frailty

- Physical assault

- NEGLECT

- Verbal/psychological

- Inadequate living

- Theft

- Abuse of meds

- Violating personal rights

- Becoming more common

- The study of death and dying

- Death has been removed from everyday experience

- We're exposed more abstractly through media

1. Shock, disbelief, DENIAL

2. ANGER

3. BARGAINING

4. DEPRESSION

5. ACCEPTANCE

1. Satisfying bodily needs

2. Maximizing security, autonomy and richness

3. Sustaining and enhancing friendships

4. Reaffirming spiritual beliefs

- Passive: Doing nothing to prevent a natural death

- 'Double-effect': Pain medication used to hasten death

- Grief: Emotional

- Mourning: Behavioral 

- Their 'pool of eligibles' is larger

- Adjusting to living alone is harder

- They have fewer intimate friendships outside of their marriage

- Broadening sense of who we are to beyond our WORK roles

- Becoming less preoccupied with our bodies

- Thinking beyond ourselves - transcending beyond our ego.

- Productive activity

- Frequent exercise

- Absence of impairment

- No depression

- Reproductive maturity

- Abstract thinking

- Limitations for social life (imaginary audience and personal fable)

- Parents and children are moving in different directions provoking jealousy

- Physical strength and health reach peak

- Health practices influence later life

- Thought becomes flexible and subjective

- Deterioration of strength and stamina

- Chronic health problems

- Menopause

- Cognitive abilities still high

- Slowing of fluid intelligence

- Sense of ID still developing

- Psychologically turn inward and focus on time left

- Mentally alert

- Speed and memory decline

- Change in living arrangements

- Little change in personality

- 'Life review'

- It's lifelong

- It's multidimensional - gains and losses

- Influence of biology and culture shift over time

- Involves a changing allocation of resources

- Can be modified (plasticity)

- Influenced by historical and social context

The MEN that threw more tantrums in their childhood:

- Achieved less education

- Achieved lower average ranking

- Were more likely to get divorced

WOMEN:

- Married men of lower SES status

- Ill-tempered mothers

Their interaction style channels them into environments which reinforce this same bad behavior.

In other words this is CUMULATIVE CONTINUITY

- Can be positive if they have good characteristics and are channeled into good environments