Social and Emotional Health
Theories that Incorporate Emotional Health and the Quality of Relationships – not just the presence of relationships – into their predictions of successful psychosocial aging.
Summarizing the research findings described in Chapter 6 of Ferraro and Wilmoth (2013):
· Quality of relationships depends on ascribed and achieved characteristics, social institutions from micro to macro levels, cohort membership and historical period.
· Patterns of mutual assistance vary with cultural beliefs, attitudes, and accepted patterns of behavior.
· Happiness and functioning are determined by developmental stage, motivation, social cognition, personality, interpersonal interactions, and emotions.
· Older adults are not necessarily lonelier than others, and they may be happier that younger adults.
· The strength of social relationships reduces risk of depression and increases lifespan. Social support and buffering against stress, positive emotions and meaning and purpose connected to relationships all contribute.
· Family connections should be augmented by non-family ties for the best outcomes.
Socioemotional Selectivity Theory
This theory suggests that older adults compensate for loss of relationships and roles and are motivated by the knowledge that they have limited time left, by withdrawing from less rewarding relationships, not seeking new relationships, and deepening remaining ones. A stark counter-example is that of elder suicide. The Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (Van Orden et al, 2010) postulates that people are more likely to kill themselves when they lack reciprocal belongingness and experience perceived burdensomeness. The reciprocal nature of belonging is important – people need to feel needed, as well having their social needs satisfied. This is the opposite of seeing oneself as a burden.
Social Input Model of Socioemotional Aging
This Theory asserts that a number of factors unique to older adults account for the overall positivity of their relationships:
1. More older adults live alone, allowing them to avoid problematic relationships.
2. Older adults can avoid problematic relationships that are unavoidable for younger adults, such as at work.
3. Older adults deal with conflict more often by avoiding it than younger adults.
4. Older adults have more experience with regulating emotions than younger adults.
5. Older adults may be more skilled at social cognition (interpreting social cues and determining best responses) than younger adults.
6. Because older adults are more likely to avoid negative interactions and choose positive ones, they elicit positive reactions from people close to them in a positive feedback loop.
7. Older adults’ remaining relationships tend to have endured for a long time and thus have already worked through conflicts.
Although all the news from research that supports this theory is good news, it does not account for the potential for older adults to suffer quite destructive interpersonal conflict, depressing levels of isolation, and frank abuse at the hands of those who should love them. We should not allow the overall surprisingly heartening data on older adult relationships to inure us to the needs of individuals. What we can do is use the good news to be unbiased and avoid pathologizing age – a topic we will return to in the next model when we explore diversity in older adults.
Strength and Vulnerability Integration (SAVI)
Factors and Responses
According to this model of emotional development across adulthood (Charles, 2010), many older adults experience an increase in positive emotions and a decrease in negative emotions. Here is a summary of contribution factors:
1. Older adults have more experience in regulating their emotions.
2. Older adults, sensing their mortality, prioritize positive emotions.
3. Older adults use selection strategies to enhance well-being:
a. Avoiding negative social environments
b. Altering situations to improve social environments
c. Attending to positive experiences more than negative ones
d. Appraising experiences in positive ways
e. Reconstructing memories with an emphasis on the positive
SAVI also predicts which older adults will have difficulty attaining a positive emotional tone in their lives: those who for various reasons cannot implement the above strategies. This would include older adults who are under chronic stress and are unable to achieve a state of equanimity from which to view and alter their circumstance; older adults who have lost the cognitive capacity to manage complex or negative emotional experiences; and older adults who have lost too many sources of social support through death or distance.
Demographic and personality factors also play a major role, consistent with the Life Course Perspective. One form of chronic stress is that of poverty, which disproportionally affects people of color. Poverty is also associated with other stressors, such as vulnerability to trauma and abuse. Personality traits of agreeableness and extraversion, and lower levels of neuroticism, favor the ability to use emotion regulation strategies and elicit positive responses from others.
