Psychology of Adulthood Aging

Concepts of Age and Demographics:

The _____________ perspective views people as if they are machines.
Mechanistic. From the mechanistic perspective, people are viewed as reacting automatically to physical forces, as behaving in predictable ways, and as being a sum of their parts.

The ____________ perspective views people as developing, maturing, and changing over time.
Organismic. From the organismic perspective, people are seen as maturing and changing as they progress through set development patterns.

A pattern of behavior associated with a certain period in development is known as a _______.
Stage. A stage refers to a set of behaviors associated with a certain period of a person's development. For example, in Freud's theory of psychosexual stages the oral stage occurs from birth to 12 or 18 months. This stage is characterized by mouth-oriented behaviors including sucking and eating.

If a psychologist views people as being affected by their past and as affecting their future, the psychologist has a _____________ perspective.
Contextual. The contextual perspective views people's behavior as occurring in context, where context is created from the past and creates the future. From this perspective, there is a strong emphasis on how people are affected by their environment and how people change their environment.

Events that most people experience in a similar way are known as ___________.
Normative. An event is normative if it occurs in a similar way for most people. Examples of normative events include puberty and menopause.

A normative __________-________ influence is an event that people experience at the same time.
History-graded. A normative history-graded influence is an event or experience that occurs at the same time for a lot of people. Examples of normative history-graded influences include the depression in the 1930s, the technological innovations of the 1990s, or the changing role and status of women in the 1920s.

A group of... [continues]

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