The Changes in Late Adulthood - Essay Example

The body experiences changes such as loss of teeth resulting in poor eating habits that cause malnutrition. Muscle atrophy and loss of muscle tissue elasticity reduce elasticity and enhance stiffness. This developmental stage would commonly be accompanied by health issues that propagate challenges associated with the respiratory, digestive, and genitourinary systems.
The cognitive changes would be explained by the selection, optimization, and compensation, SOC theory cited by Kail and Cavanaugh (2013) which postulates that people in late adulthood would exhibit greater motivation and persistence in compensation tasks. Wisdom would be critical in their construction of integrity while they maintain their attention capabilities and cognitive processing of visual information but would have their ability to pay attention to a particular task decline. Due to a shrinking brain, their memory also decreases as they become more forgetful, indecisive, and intellectually slow. Late adulthood has also been associated with off-target verbosity where the involved persons tend to drift to irrelevant issues during conversations (Gerstorf et al., 2010).

The socioemotional changes in late adulthood include a decline in intensity levels for positive and negative emotions. It comes with disengagement, maintaining low activity levels, and high levels of personal satisfaction. Due to the loss of families and friends, they adopt a dismissive attachment style to help them cope with this. There would be a decline in the activities involved in their leisure time with the majority being associated with religiosity and spirituality (Gerstorf et al., 2010). They would spend considerable time reconciling the realities of life and evaluating their lives. But the socioemotional selectivity theory cited by Kail and Cavanaugh (2013) postulates on older adults optimize their social networks with rewarding relationships.
2. Analyze late adulthood and death of an individual as a culmination of the life span development process.
Late adulthood signifies a definitive culmination of the cycle of human development, being a period of renewal according to Nelson (2004). Even though unfair and ignorant stereotypes and ageism hasten death in some elderly persons, a majority of them would maintain healthy lives up to their transition to death, which defines the final event in late adulthood (Berger, 2008). But people have varied cultures, beliefs, and fears about death. As such, their adaptation to news of their impending death would occur in five stages: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance (Kail & Cavanaugh, 2013). At this stage, people would be engaged more in life review. Of importance though would be to treat adults with the respect they deserve and allow individuals to fearlessly accomplish the transition, helping the loved ones left behind to cope with the loss.
3. Discuss ageism and stereotypes associated with late adulthood.
Ageism refers to a form of prejudice where the elderly get judged and categorized based on their chronological age (Gerstorf et al., 2010). This comes during the late adulthood stage with negative attitudes taking several forms according to Nelson (2004). The first would be depression and loneliness, a stereotype portraying a lack of friends and family among older adults and higher mood disorder rates. This stage has also been widely associated with a lack of unproductive life, perceived to be a burden to young and middle adulthood. Promoting the young as beautiful and old adults as useless contributes to the ageism stereotype. Ageism could make the involved persons less intelligent and has proven to be detrimental to their cognitive abilities. Aging adults with fears rooted in stereotypes would possibly fear the undermining of their normal thinking. Lack of confidence would impair their memory with negative expectations affecting their cognition. For the sake of their health, such stereotypes and attitudes which reflect biases toward their abilities should be avoided (Berger, 2008).
4. Evaluate ways to promote continued wellness and mitigate declining health associated with aging.
According to Berger (2008), healthy habits significantly inform on the physical wellness of human beings. Apart from positively changing daily habits and routines, early detection and subsequent maintenance of chronic diseases and conditions and appropriate use of preventive medicine would help mitigate the negative aspects that come with aging. When employed simultaneously with the maintenance of a healthy diet, moderate consumption of alcohol, healthy choices, and routine exercises, this positively impacts the health and well-being of elderly adults. Preventive medicine together with high-quality medical care would be critical in maintaining health and lessening the harsh effects that come with aging. Read More