Relationships, Divorce, and Aging Concepts

• These notes cover methods for studying lifespan development, heredity vs environment, developmental contextualism, physical/cognitive/social development, and views on aging

Research Goals

• Understanding how individual well-being changes over a lifetime is a key research goal
• Research explores differences in these changes between people
• Research also explores the relationships between changes in different life areas, and the causes behind individual well-being changes

The Meaning of Age

• Age is seen as an independent variable - a carrier of information related to developmental processes
• These processes involve biological (maturation), psychological (learning), and social factors (social roles)
• Systems (interactions between disposition and environment) also play a role
• The link, or correlation, between a person's biological and chronological age ranges from 0.5 to 0.7

Methods, Instruments, and Theories

• A good theory should be fruitful, definable, testable, valid, parsimonious and have explanatory power
• Experiments offer advantages, including establishing causality and controlling variables
• Experiments can be completed relatively fast
• Development is hard to measure experimentally, since age is a variable that cannot be manipulated
• Quasi-experiments involve forming groups based on known characteristics, and natural experiments involve groups based on environmental conditions
• Experiments do not have randomization

Non-Experimental Methods

• Cross-sectional research studies different age groups at a single time, is fast, efficient, and can study wide age ranges
• Cross-sectional research can have representative groups
• Age and cohort effects are difficult to differentiate, and inferences are limited to age differences
• Longitudinal research examines one age group over a long time with many measurement points
• Longitudinal research enables inferences about age-related changes and keeps cohort effects constant
• Difficulties with longitudinal: high time and monetary costs, sample attrition, retest/training effects, and limited generalizability
• Cohort sequence research adds a new group at each measurement point
• Longitudinal research focuses on changes within one age group, which confounds age and historical time
• Cross-sectional research looks across different groups at the same time
• Time-lag analysis examines different groups at different times, and confounds cohort and historical time

Age, Cohort, and Period Effects

• Age effects relate to processes closely tied to aging, and can be biological, psychological or social
• Cohort effects describe differences due to formative historical experiences, specific to a generation
• Period effects relate to socio-cultural events at the time of data collection like COVID

Heredity and Environment

• Phenotype is a product of both environment and genetics
• Behavioral genetics studies the influence of environmental factors and genetics on traits
• E.g., 50% of individual differences in intelligence are genetically determined within a population
• Heritability reaches 100% if everyone has ideal developmental conditions, and 0% if testing is culturally biased
• Twin studies compare monozygotic (identical) twins to dizygotic (fraternal) twins - 100% vs 50% shared genes
• Adoption studies explore the similarity between adopted siblings versus biological siblings
• Heritability Coefficient (H²) = 2 x (MZ correlation – DZ correlation)
• The formula assumes monozygotic twins are twice as genetically similar as dizygotic twins
• Non-shared environments are calculated by 1-MZ correlation
• Shared environments are calculated by DZ correlation – (0.5 x H²)
• Heritability differs across domains, like vocational interests (50%), reasoning (20%), and general intelligence (50%)
• Big 5 personality traits have around 50% heritability and little shared environment influence

Heritability Changes Across Life

• Height heritability is low in infancy but increases
• Conservatism shifts from low heritability and high shared environment in childhood to high heritability and low shared environment in adulthood
• Religiosity changes from low heritability and high shared environment as a teenager to higher heritability and lower shared environment as an adult Cognition follows a similar pattern with no shared environment effects post-age 12
• DZ correlation in IQ decreases while MZ correlation stabilizes in adulthood
• Genetics have the most influence and increase significantly in adulthood
• Shared environment has high influence in childhood but declines to no influence in adulthood
• Non-shared environment influence is small throughout life

Effect of Genes on Experience

• Genotype-environment interaction:
• Parents genetically related to child select the child's environment through passive effects
• Influence decreases throughout childhood
• Evocative effects define how predisposition triggers environmental reactions, and remain constant
• (Pro)active effects are defined when individuals select environments fitting their predispositions, and increase with age

Educational Pessimism and SES

• Differences in parenting have limited effects on a child's interests, intelligence, and personality under average conditions
• Key factors for "average expectable environment" include:
  • Stimulation and learning
  • Absence of abuse or neglect, which promotes standard development
• SES effects on IQ are most evident at the extremes:
  • High SES correlates to genes accounting for 80% of IQ variance, with minimal environmental effects
  • Low SES correlates to genes accounting for very little IQ variance
• Environmental effects are large in low Socio-Economic Status with Shared environment > non-shared

Heritability Across Training Sessions

• MZ correlation increases with training
• Initial differences thereby reduce
• DZ correlation decreases with training
• Genetic differences become more clear

Summary of Heredity

• Development requires both genetic predisposition and a supportive environment
• Heritability varies based on genomes/environments, domains (intelligence, personality) and life stage (childhood vs adulthood)
• Disposition and environments are dynamic
• High heritability does not equal unchangeable

Developmental Contextualism

• Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory defines socialization contexts emphasizing interactions
• The individual possesses biological and personality characteristics
• The Microsystem is the immediate surrounding environment
• The Mesosystem describes direct connections betwen microsystems
• The Exosystem is the indirect connection between environments
• The Macrosystem defines the broad cultural context and Zeitgeist
• Time involves both ontogenetic time, and historical time

Pros and Cons of Theory

• Very comprehensive, since context is emphasized
• Not parsimonious given the neglect of biological factors
• Not always testable -> more of a broad metatheory

Social Address vs. Process-Oriented Approaches

• Social address approach identifies existing differences
• Process-oriented approach understands mechanisms and context
• It identifies modification-relevant environmental interactions
• E.g., Headstart program examines the impact of process, context and person

Empirical Development

• Forests are close to home are good for health
• County explains 8% of variance in wellbeing
• Behavior = traits * press following Raymond Cattell's theories of person-environment interactions
• As press increases on a trait, so too does importance of the trait
• If a situation does not press for a trait, the person's standing is irrelevant

Competence and Environmental Press, Stability of Development

• A good match between person characteristics and demands defines "goodness of fit"
• Powell Lawton examined these environment interactions Competence:
• An individual's upper level ability to function
• Environmental press: physical or social demands put on an individual
• Matching creates positive adaptation
• Can refer to both level and interindividual stability, disregarding mean change

Development

• Development is life long, multidimensional, multi-directional
• E.g., fluid intelligence declines but crystalized intelligence stays stable to late adulthood
• Change can be both quantitative and qualitative
• Development has potentials, limits and is somewhat moldable
• Dynamic gains and losses shift toward subjective gains until late life, emphasizing goal orientation
• Shaped by factors such as normative-age graded, normative-historically graded and non-normatively graded criteria

Physical Development

• Interindividual differences in motor skills impact babies and toddlers
• Motor development is better when sleeping on the back and there is an emotionally responsive mother
• Sensory function relates to cognitive skills, which is more pronounced in late adulthood
• Sensory deprivation involves low sensory input decreases stimuli, thereby reducing cognitive ability
• Cognitive permeation describes when reduced cognition slows sensory information processing
• A common cause could be brain aging reducing cognitive function

Hypotheses

• Cognitive tests also rely on general functioning, which disproves that this is a general phenomenon
• To test, use the dual task paradigm, where tasks are performed simultaneously or separately
• Losses during simultaneous conditions suggest a shared resource
• In old age motor performance requires more resources, and old people prioritize motor

Biological Theories of Aging

• Aging can stem from:
  • Functional decline with cognitive, physical, mood and mental health aspects
  • Phenotypic aspects of brain health, body composition, homeostatic mechanisms and energetics
  • Molecular Damage, Defective Repair, Energy Exhaustion, and Signal/Noise reduction

Health - Dimensions & Facets

• Refers to a state of complete physical, social, and mental wellbeing, going beyond absence of disease
• Involves functional health (physiological changes relating to age), physical health (chronic diseases), and subjective health (self reported health)
• Subjective health tends to greater than physical health, which is greater than functional health

Domains of Health, Historical Change

• Psychological/social well being predicts physical functioning
• Aging leads to less physiological flexibility but better coping strategies
• Better cardiovascular health exists today
• Older adults have greater functinal health than did those 20 years ago
• Death rates from heart disease, cancer, diabetes decreases
• Increased prevalence of comorbidities has increased from cancer and diabetes today
• Malnutrition, Obesity, and low activity level remain on the rise

Longitudinal Data

• Average trajectories describe how sadness is stable but increases in old age, and openness decreases
• Change trajectories quantify level/rate/onset of decline
• Individual differences in onset of decline occur, e.g., disabled people spend more time in terminal decline
• Those controlling regulation spend less time in decline
• Lower wellbeing may also predict faster decreases

Context Effects

• Family: happiness between partners correlates
• County: 8% of person variance is between-county variance
• Natural Quasi-Experiments and case-matched controls:
  • Event-related change in well-being show little ups with big downs
  • Some events have more homogenous effect vs others

What We Can't Do

• Traditional longitudinal studies create no inferences about mechanisms, ecological validity etc
• Ecological inference fallacy defines conclusions inaccurately drawn among groups
• Collect data more regularly
• Incorporate contexts such as partner affect
• Quantify within person fluctuations
• Examine social context, stress, and anxiety

Cognitive Development and Plasticity

• Influences on test-performance are not ability
• Stereotype threat and motivation, bias, physical health etc play factors
• Bias relies on test-taking familiar & training effects, test conditions etc
• Tests must be fair, equal across groups
• Healthy, relaxed people achieve better scores
• Lower familiarity impacts underperformance
• Sensory impairment impacts following instructions
• Fear leads to emotion underperformance

Motivation and Relevance

• Lab testing confounds causality
• Age differences are in max performance
• Selectivity defines how individuals assign goals

Quiz questions covering topics such as Gottman's Four Horsemen in relationships, effects of divorce on children, the structure of life goals, views on aging, and the influence of genetics on IQ across different socioeconomic statuses.