Late Adulthood Essay

When elderly people move into the last of life’s eight stages of psychosocial development, they enter the ego-integrity-versus-despair stage. This process is defined by looking back over someone’s life, evaluating it, then accepting it. People who become successful in this stage feel a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Erikson refers to this acceptance as integrity. This differs from generativity because one is accepting the end of their life, instead of accepting where their life will start in a sense of career and self. However, if one is to look back on their life with dissatisfaction, they may feel they have been cheated or missed opportunities. Such individuals will mostly be depressed or angry about the way life turned out and

In the body-transcendence versus body-preoccupation stage, one must be able to learn and accept physical changes that happen as we get older, we refer to this as transcendence. If someone is unable to do so, they become preoccupied with the physical deterioration, to the detriment of their personality development. Although the physical capabilities are not the same in the elderly as when they were young, many older people stay regularly fit considering their age. The changes that began in middle adulthood are becoming more unmistakable by the time one finds themselves in late adulthood. The two distinct types of aging are primary aging and secondary aging. Primary aging involves the irreversible changes that occur as people get older due to genetic programming. Secondary aging refers to the changes that are bought on by illnesses and diseases, not increased by age itself. Late adulthood is a very interesting period of life. Since people are now living longer than ever before, late adulthood is increasing in length. Whether we say it starts at 65 or 70 years, the amount of people included in this stage is larger than ever before, due to medicine and technological advances. One of the most obvious signs someone is in late adulthood would be a person’s hair. Most people’s hair become distinctly gray and eventually white, which may thin