Essay On Life Expectancy

INTRODUCTION

Up to the early twentieth century, the average life expectancy was 47 years of age. In ancient Greece and Rome, philosophers wrote treatises on teaching, learning, and aging; when these philosophies combined with research in the field of psychology during the mid-1900s, they stimulated theories. A theory is an orderly, integrated set of statements that describes, explains, and predicts behavior (Berk, 2007). Psychologists and developmental psychologists formulated theories on the best practices for teaching children and adolescents using Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic (personality) theory, and Jean Piaget’s cognitivist (learning) theory; these theorists presumed developmental changes ended in adolescence (Lemme, 2006); presumably because life expectancy was only about 47 years. However, in the early and mid-20th century higher education, hygiene practices, and modern medicine decreased the frequency rates of morbidity and mortality while increasing life expectancy rates to 77 years of age. Transformations were also occurring in the environment that would change adult lifestyle practices from previous generations and conditions of aging: modern household conveniences offered leisure time for recreational exercise, and agrarian and shipping practices offered reliable nutritious foods.

For the first time in history, whole age cohorts were aging simultaneously (Lemme, 2006, p. 2-4). Research in adult development, aging, and change over the life course emerged in the 1960s that brought biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, developmental psychologists, and neuroscientists together with professionals in education, family studies, medicine, public health, and social services to form the interdisciplinary ...

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...ociologists Charles Cooley and George Herbert Mead are recognized for their contributions to the sociological concept of the looking glass self, an idea of how people evaluate society’s reaction of them (Lemme, p. 77).

Gerontology is a multidisciplinary study of the aging process through the lifespan and life course. Robert Neil Butler, the father of gerontology, was a physician, gerontologist, psychiatrist, Pulitzer Prize writer, president of the National Institute on Aging (NIA), and social activist to society’s awareness of aging and ageism (The Guardian, 2010). Sociologists and gerontologists in counseling and educational settings use qualitative methods of observation to investigate a phenomenon. Gerontologists teach younger generations the importance of learning vicariously through older adults to avoid experiences and lifestyles that shorten longevity (p. 8).