Today we finalized the syllabus and course info for the lab course. As soon as I get access to the course I can get everything posted. I received a lovely book (not a professional one - written for the general public) and thought I would share it with you:
Raines, R. (1997). A Time to Live: Seven steps of creative aging. NY: Plume.
Another book that is a favorite of mine is:
Snowdon, D. (2002). Aging with Grace: What the nun study teaches us about leading longer, healthier, and more meaningful lives. Bantam Press.
I particularly like the nun study book because it talks in great detail about research and the serendipity that occurs during the process. We don't hear enough about that! When you read a journal article it sounds like everything went exactly as planned - which is rarely the case. Many times, you accidentally discover something during the analysis which totally changes the direction of the study. An example was our realization in a previous study that it appeared that we could determine locus of control from people's earliest memories. This was definitely NOT an idea that we went into the project with!
Happy reading!
Lee Stadtlander
I've found the nun study interesting, as well. However, most of the research on the oldest old that I've been following has come from Paul Baltes and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, e.g., The Berlin Aging Study. Baltes and colleagues have done a lot of research on cognitive changes that occur with aging, and were among the first researchers to conduct longitudinal studies into the psychology of the oldest old. I recommend his work to the rest of you; there's some very interesting stuff there.
ReplyDeleteI just finished a literature critique on an article by colleagues of Baltes':
Kunzmann, U., & RIchter, D. (2009). Emotional reactivity across the adult life span: The cognitive pragmatics makes a difference. Psychology and Aging, 24(4), 879-889. doi: 10.1037/a0017347.
I highly recommend the APA journal Psychology and Aging as an excellent resource for information on our subject. There are a lot of interesting studies in it, including a new one by Richter and Kunzmann on empathy in the current edition.
I became interested in this topic for a couple of reasons. First, as a graduate student in a new subject at 54, I have to consider that I will one day be one of these elders; I want to know as much as I can about maintaining my own cognitive abilities as I age. Given that modern estimates of life span show us aging into the 80s and 90s, I realized that I have another 40 years as a productive scientist—a full career lifetime!
Second, I've lived in an area where there are many older people for 12 years now. I've watched as a number of them succumbed to cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer's, as well as lost both my parents and other relatives. Culturally, I see a need to help my generation (and those that follow) better prepare for the kinds of challenges we have ahead of us, something that few studies have really done to this point, as Dr. Stadtlander noted.
From an evolutionary perspective, we should not be that surprised that our aging challenges are unknown territory. For most of the existence of humanity, the average life span was in the mid-20s; 40 was old! Many of the diseases we're seeing among our elders currently were extremely rare in past centuries because so few people survived to the point of developing them—and most of the diseases that killed people off were due to chronic malnutrition/starvation and subsistence farming. Our current (developed world) generations are an evolutionary experiment for which we really have little guidance, and thus an excellent place for psychologists to do groundbreaking research.
I'm really looking forward to this project!
Michael