Friday, July 11, 2014

Older People Are Happy?


As we've been learning throughout these blog posts, there is a huge stigma against older adults in our culture. Due to their age, many older individuals are unable to hold a job, are ignored, and are unable to receive the mental health services that they need. While many of these aspects are true for the older generations, this TED Talk provides compelling evidence that older adults might not be as unhappy as we perceive them to be... Take a look!

Food For Thought:

Did this information surprise you? Why or why not?

How does this evidence change the way in which we (as helping professionals) can advocate for this generation?

3 comments:

  1. I thought this was pretty interesting. For one, I liked that the elderly tend to process and focus on positive things more than negative. As an example in the study, they showed older individuals a series of pictures, some showing negative things and some depicting positive scenes. When asked to recall as many images as they could, the elderly were more likely than young to remember positive images. The speaker also discussed emotions, and how the elderly can manage multiple emotions at once much more effectively than the young generations. For instance, an older adult might get that "tear" in the eye while smiling, signifying something of a happy combined with sadness emotion. In other words, the speaker's point was that the elderly aren't necessarily "happier" than young people on a basic 1-10 scale, but they certainly are more "positive" and more mature in their handling and displaying of emotions. Additionally, some of the statistics at the beginning of the talk were interesting, such as the change from a "pyramid" type grouping of the existing age groups on Earth into a "rectangle," where there are many, many more elderly surviving into higher ages.

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  2. This is really interesting. I tend to think of the elderly as more "mindful" - not in the sense of practicing meditation, but the sense that they can moderate their reactivity to life events or interactions with people. I'd suspect that in addition to the factors that the presenter laid out, there's also a "weathering the storm" component. In other words, elderly people have endured/survived so many life experiences, that over time they respond in ways that become less abrasive and more subtle.

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