The physical effects of aging usually jump and perhaps that’s why they are well known. During the most advanced stages of our life we usually lose strength and flexibility, we get tired more and our skin wrinkles. But beyond being forgotten, Something changes in our brain. Not only with their abilities but also in what affects our character and our personality.
Because the changes that we live at the psychological level with the advance of age go beyond the dementia we associate with this period. The changes are varied and include both positive and negative aspects.
The question of what these traits are rather complex. Different people age differently, so some of the studies on the subject may be contradictory. “The exact change in an individual’s features is unpredictable,” he explains in an article in Psychology Today the psychologist of the University of Edinburgh René Mõttus.
One of the personalities that we associate with the elderly is that of the old Cascarrabias. The idea that as we get older we become more irritable and closed of mind is quite widespread, but Scientific evidence is very limited. It is true that age can lead us to a certain degree of social isolation and that this generates psychological stress that in turn supposes a slab for our physical and mental health, as indicated in a study published in 2014 in the magazine Annual Review of Psychologybut the myth of the old Cascarrabias may well be just that: a myth.
Because many studies have found that the trend points in the opposite direction, that is, when we age, on average, we tend to become more friendly.
According to Mõttus, the idea that people become more friendly, cooperative, organized and responsible is generally more successful: “Such changes in personality are slightly more common among people than opposite changes.”
One of the key phenomena in the development of our personality when we age is that of the so -called personality maturation. Maturation It is not an exclusive phenomenon of youth but is maintained until the elderly is well advanced.
As we become greater, the charge of responsibilities increases. For example, we go from having numerous people who take care of us (not only in the family, also in social) to having to be more and more of ourselves. And not only does the number of people who can take care of us decrease, it also usually increases the number of people we must take care of, such as our partner or our children. This can make us get more responsible with age.
As we pointed out before, there is diversity in changes and not everything is positive. On the one hand because there is a lot of diversity in the changes, on the other because there are traits that seem to tend towards an evolution that we could catalog as “negative.”
A study by MõTtus himself and published in 2011 in the magazine Psychology and Aging He observed different results when studying different age cohorts and observed that the group of octogenarians analyzed progressed towards lower extraversion, cordiality and awareness, something that did not happen in the sexagenaries analyzed (the other cohort included in the study).
Live 100 years
Studying changes in personality as our age progresses is not a simple task. The world living different generations of people changes a lot for comparing one generation with another does not give us too much information.
To know how this we must study the same group of people (OA very similar groups) over the years. Doing this is not easy since they require cohort studies that expand over years or decades.
Knowing if these changes have any limit is also complicated. The studies with cohorts are losing participants over time, as is natural, and with it. It is psor that some analysis should be limited to comparing people of several generations, as a study conducted in Japan and published in 2006 in the magazine Age (Dordrecht, Netherlands).
This reminds us of one of the problems that can be associated with this type of studies: The survivor bias. At an early age our personality keeps a certain correlation with the risk of dying since in our personality a certain risk propensity can be marked, which in turn increases the probability that, for example, we fight in a traffic accident.
The same can be worth in other ages. A more prone personality to addictions can also lead to premature death. The question is whether this continues to occur throughout our lives. The answer may well be, which would imply that the studies analyzing this type of changes must take into account this possible bias when comparing people of different ages, even when they are compared with themselves.
In WorldOfSoftware | One of the greatest aging experts has just explained what he does to live more. It makes sense
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