In addition to these negative impressions of the elderly, there are also some more general problems, that is, how do we understand the elderly, how to deal with They get along, how to resolve the conflicts that arise in the process of getting along. This article is from the WeChat official account: a seat (ID: yixiclub) , author: Peng Huamao (Beijing Normal University psychology professor), title Picture from: Visual China
Hello everyone, I am Peng Huamao from the Laboratory of Geriatric Psychology, Department of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, and I am doing research on geriatric psychology.
There have been many studies focusing on children and adolescents, but relatively few studies focusing on the elderly. And society seems to be pushing the boundaries of old age forward. The first patient diagnosed with the epidemic in Beijing in June of this year was only 52 years old, and everyone called him “Master Xicheng.” Some of us born in the 70s have already said that we should be grandparents. After a colleague of my age posted this picture in his circle of friends, there was only one sentence: Go to your uncle.
The former we call the plus frame, the latter we call the minus frame, usually people spend more money under the minus frame. Our decision-making results will be different due to different ways of expression. We call this phenomenon the framing effect.
This kind of framing effect has been found in many studies. We have added the elderly for a comparative study and found that the elderly do not show a greater framing effect than the young, and they are the same.
The second study is about the decision-making process of the elderly, that is, before making the final decision, will the elderly make a decision after viewing less information?
Through prior investigation and research, we have selected some tasks that are of different relevance for the elderly and young people. The so-called high-relevance tasks are tasks that are important and familiar to him, and the low-relevance tasks mean this The matter is neither important nor familiar.
We put such a task on an information matrix. Each grid contains a description of an attribute. You can click to view it with the mouse. How many grids, how long, and how many times do you want to look at? , We don’t limit, whatever.
We recorded the mouse clicks in the background, and wherever the blue line went, they checked the information. We can see that the elderly areBefore making a choice, I checked more information than young people, showing a very cautious and thoughtful characteristic.
These two results are just two of our studies. We have many other studies that have found this pattern, that is, the performance of the elderly is no worse than that of the young, which should be said to be very unexpected.
We went to look for various explanations and found that in the literature, those reports that older people are worse than younger people in decision-making. The tasks they use often require strong basic cognitive abilities, such as memory and speed. . Those who say that the decision-making of the elderly have not deteriorated, and the tasks usually selected do not require that strong cognitive ability, such as our tasks.
Moreover, we also found that older people will perform better in matters that are closer to them and more important. As you can see, in terms of choosing to make friends and choosing to buy a car, you can view more information when you make friends. These results suggest that the elderly’s motivation, emotions, cognitive abilities, as well as the situational characteristics of decision-makers, will affect his decision-making.
So we cannot simply conclude that the basic cognitive ability of the elderly has declined, so we can simply infer that his decision-making ability has also declined. More broadly, we cannot simply speculate that there will be a single decline in all aspects of the elderly.
In fact, in the process of aging, there is both loss and gain. Many people in academia have discovered this phenomenon. On the one hand, there are many research reports that the cognitive and physiological functions of the elderly are decreasing, but on the other hand, there are also many research reports that their emotional experience, life satisfaction, and the quality of close interpersonal relationships, including subjective well-being, Are on the rise. We call this phenomenon the aging paradox.
Stanford University once conducted a tracking study of the emotional experience of adults aged 18 to 84 in their daily lives, spanning 10 years. I found that in daily life, older people have more positive experiences than young people, that is, more positive emotions than negative emotions. Moreover, the emotional experience of the elderly is more stable, and the intensity of emotional experience will not fluctuate greatly compared with tomorrow.
Why can the elderly maintain a relatively good life and mentality when they are physically and mentally depressed?
The famous German developmental psychologist Baltes proposed a SOC theory to explain how we should deal with the loss of physical and mental resources.
SOC theory is the first letter of three words, selection, optimization, and compensation. Baltes often uses the example of Polish pianist Rubinstein to illustrate this theory. Rubinstein was the most representative pianist in the 19th century. He could still hold piano recitals when he was 80 years old. Someone asked him What is the mystery in it.
He said that first of all, he only chooses a few tracks to play. This is the choice. Then he will practice these several tracks repeatedly, which is optimization. In order to cope with the decline in finger flexibility, he will slow down the entire playing speed before the fast rhythm comes, so that when the fast rhythm comes, he only needs to play relatively fast, which is compensation. From this example, we can see that the adaptability of the elderly cannot be underestimated.
The social emotional choice theory derived from SOC theory was proposed by Laura L. Carstensen. She was my mentor when I was visiting for advanced studies at Stanford. She used this theory to explain why the emotional experience of the elderly is better than Young people are more active.
Before talking about the specific points of this theory, let’s look at two issues.
First, if you have half an hour of free time, without any external pressure or arrangement, you can choose to spend this half an hour alone, who would you choose to be with? Family, the author of a novel you just read, or a friend you recently met with many common interests?
Second question, if you are going to move to another country by yourself and have half an hour of free time, who do you choose to be with?
Among these two questions, the first question is that most young people choose the author of a novel they just read or a friend they just met. Older people choose to be with their families. But to the second questionAt that time, everyone would choose to be with their family.
What is the difference between these two questions? The same is half an hour left, the difference lies in the urgency of the remaining time. Our behavioral goals can be roughly divided into two categories. The author of the novel I just read and the friend I just met, it reflects the knowledge acquisition goal. And family members represent emotion regulation goals.
The goal of knowledge acquisition is to say that we do something for the purpose of understanding the physical environment and social environment around us, so we will listen to many classes, read many books, and meet different people. The goal of emotion regulation is to say that I do such things for the purpose of obtaining a positive emotional experience, so we will seek intimacy, find the meaning of life, and then focus on the present and invest in certain things.
The two types of goals are not superior or inferior, only the difference in priority. When we feel that the future time is unlimited, we will prioritize the goal of knowledge, and when we feel that the future time is limited, the goal of emotion regulation will become the priority goal.
In a natural life state, the elderly’s perception of future time is limited, so they will take emotional regulation as their priority goal. Therefore, many elderly people value whether they have positive emotional experiences in many things, and they also value his family relationships.
After we know that the priority goal of the elderly is the goal of emotional regulation, we can actually understand many behaviors of the elderly.
For example, learning new technologies, why are some elderly people willing to learn, and some don’t?
There may be many reasons for this, but I think a very important reason is that the elderly who are willing to learn are because they have gained joy, confidence, and satisfaction in the process, and the elderly who are unwilling to learn may It was during this process that I encountered setbacks, self-criticism, and troubles.
If a young person feels these negative experiences, his priority goal is to gain knowledge. He can overcome these negative experiences and keep learning. But old people often don’t, and they don’t learn when they feel uncomfortable.
Moreover, in order to gain positive emotional experience, the elderly will also avoid a lot of negative stimuli. For example, they don’t want to see tragedies or pictures. The older I am, the more I am Is such that.
Of course, we can also take advantage of the characteristics of the elderly. When you want to persuade him to do something, you can talk about it in a positive way, such as what are the benefits of exercising, rather than in a negative way. What are the disadvantages of exercising?
After removing the simple label saying that old age is a total decline, let’s look at some of the impressions of the elderly that I mentioned at the beginning. If you analyze it carefully, you will find that there are a lot of here. It’s not entirely caused by age.
Cheated
Elderly people who buy health care products and buy insurance are cheated. This is often mentioned. Some people say Is the elderly’s ability to judge and trust others too easy? But I want to remind everyone that the results of our research just now-given that the information is correct and comprehensive, the elderly are very cautious and considerate, and his performance is not bad.
Then why are you still deceived? The reason is of course complicated.
One thing I think is that the elderly have a great need for health, which gives scammers room to cheat.
The second is that older people have relatively little information about these health products and insurance. When information is relatively lacking, it will mainly use others’ recommendations as the basis for judgment.
In fact, for health products and insurance, we all lack professional knowledge, except to check the corresponding professional knowledge-and few people do this, most of us listen to other people’s recommendations. The elderly listen to the recommendations of sales promotion, we listen to the recommendations of friends, public accounts, and popular bloggers, and you will find that there is no essential difference.
And people are not completely rational people. When I went to buy clothes, it was obvious that this piece of clothing was very general to wear, but the sales people kept boasting about it. Wearing it is so special and it suits your temperament. ,I might8/101801552670.jpg?imageView2/2/w/1000/format/jpg/interlace/1/q/85″ data-w=”1031″ data-h=”721″>
Sometimes we feel that our parents are old and can’t take care of ourselves well, and may be deceived by bad guys. So we always want to take care of everything and arrange everything for them, and sometimes it’s “I don’t want you to think, I want what I think” situation. But in fact, elderly people have the desire to take control of their lives. This is what we call a sense of control in psychology.
I have a friend who does not live in the same city as his parents. He is worried about what will happen to his parents when he gets older, so he installs a camera in his parents’ home. As a result, he posted to a circle of friends one day, saying that the old couple quietly booked air tickets and hotels, unplugged the camera at home, and blocked him from the circle of friends, and went to travel. When he found out, the old couple had already slipped to Shaanxi.
We can take a look at this scene, is it very familiar, like our rebellious adolescence? But this is actually a very typical expression of the elderly’s need for control. We can control our daily life. This can make us feel at ease. This is also true for the elderly.
Professor Lange of Harvard University and her student Rodin once did a study on the sense of control of the elderly in nursing homes. This study is very famous. They divided the elderly in nursing homes into two groups, a sense of responsibility improvement group and a control group.
We can see that the content of the two groups is the same, but one group can make their own decisions, and the other group has to listen to the arrangement.
This experiment was conducted for three weeks, and we can see that the two groups of elderly people are quite different. Elderly people in the increased sense of responsibility group reported more pleasure, higher and stronger vitality, while all indicators in the control group were declining, and only the degree of adhesion to the staff increased. This study fully demonstrates theFrom the beginning of the year to old age, we will experience a sense of reproduction, which means that we want to take care of the next generation and work hard for the happiness of the next generation or the next generations. This is the sense of reproduction.
The elders repost these posts, in fact, they want to share what they think is good with the younger generation. This is also a manifestation of a sense of value and a sense of reproduction, but some older people may lack the necessary information literacy For example, knowing the source of information, understanding the characteristics of network information dissemination, evaluating the authenticity of information, etc., will this happen.
Tencent Research Institute once used WeChat as a representative to investigate the digital life of the elderly, and found that although juniors teach the elderly to use WeChat, they teach tools such as red envelopes, voice, and video chat. Functions, but some older people are more concerned about things that few people care about.
For example, no one told them what kind of official account is of high quality. No one told them that “Yiyi” was a high-quality official account, and no one told them that the official account of our Beijing Normal University Elderly Psychology Laboratory was of high quality.
So the younger generation should share this information with the elderly, share the good information with them, and enrich their information channels. This may be the solution.
Finally, I would like to emphasize that some young people will be upset and say, Why can’t the elders in their own family travel like others?, To sing, to learn this and that?
In class, I often ask students to talk about the living conditions of their grandparents at home. One of the students said that when they see your grandparents, they all use smartphones and chat on the Internet. I am very surprised. Grandparents are very traditional and conservative. They buy groceries, cook, take a walk, and watch TV every day. When he says this, he speaks with shame.
But I want to say that it doesn’t matter, the elderly will choose his lifestyle according to his own situation. We don’t want our parents to use other people’s children to demand us, the elders don’t want us to use other people’s grandparents and other people’s parents to measure them. The mental needs and lifestyles of the elderly are diverse, and we must tolerate this diversity.
What I am talking about today is only the tip of the iceberg of elderly psychology, and the elderly that our research has touched are mainly urban elderly. This is our biggest limitation and regret. But I believe that as more and more people pay attention to the elderly, our understanding of the elderly and old age will be more comprehensive.
The uncles and aunts who have come to participate in our research often thank us for our attention to the elderly. They also remember the little work we have done, but I want to express my gratitude to them here. An optimistic and positive attitude towards life and vigorous vitality gave me great encouragement, allowing me to go on this path.
They are also them, so that I can look at the old age that we are all about to enter peacefully.
This article is from WeChat official account:One seat (ID: yixiclub), author: Penghua Mao (professor at Beijing Normal University, Department of Psychology)