New Frontiers in Resilient Aging: Life-Strengths and Well-Being in Late Life

by Edited by Prem S. Fry , Corey L. M. Keyes

• ISBN13: 9780521509855
• ISBN10: 0521509858
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-09-06
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

A typically pessimistic view of aging is that it leads to a steady decline in physical and mental abilities. In this volume leading gerontologists and geriatric researchers explore the immense potential of older adults to overcome the challenges of old age and pursue active lives with renewed vitality. The contributors believe that resilience capacities diminishing with old age is a misconception and argue that individuals may successfully capitalize on their existing resources, skills and cognitive processes in order to achieve new learning, continuing growth, and enhanced life-satisfaction. By identifying useful psychological resources such as social connectedness, personal engagement and commitment, openness to new experiences, social support and sustained cognitive activity, the authors present a balanced picture of resilient aging. Older adults, while coping with adversity and losses, can be helped to maintain a complementary focus on psychological strengths, positive emotions, and regenerative capacities to achieve continued growth and healthy longevity.

Table of Contents

List of figures	p. ix
List of tables	p. xi
Notes on contributors	p. xii
Foreword	p. xx
Acknowledgments	p. xxii
Introduction	p. 1
Sources of human life-strengths, resilience, and health	p. 15
Growth is not just for the young: growth narratives, eudaimonic resilience, and the aging self	p. 60
Physical resilience and aging: correcting the Tithonus error and the crème brûlée error	p. 90
You can teach an old dog new tricks: harnessing neuroplasticity after brain injury in older adults	p. 104
Resilience in the face of cognitive aging: experience, adaptation, and compensation	p. 130
Why do some people thrive while others succumb to disease and stagnation? Personality, social relations, and resilience	p. 162
Psychosocial resources as predictors of resilience and healthy longevity of older widows	p. 185
Resilience and longevity: expert survivorship of centenarians	p. 213
The socioemotional basis of resilience in later life	p. 239
Emotional resilience and beyond: a synthesis of findings from lifespan psychology and psychopathology	p. 258
Risk, resilience, and life-course fit: older couples' encores following job loss	p. 283
Resilience in mobility in the context of chronic disease and aging: cross-sectional and prospective findings from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Study of Aging	p. 310
Positive aging: resilience and reconstruction	p. 340
Index	p. 357
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