Social & Emotional Development in Late Adulthood

All 6 Terms & Definitions

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST)

Laura Carstensen's theory that the goals people pursue are determined by their perceived time horizon. With an open-ended future, people prioritise information and new social contacts. With a limited future (as in late adulthood or any mortality-salient context), people prioritise emotional goals — deepening close relationships, maximising positive experience, finding present-moment meaning. SST explains social network pruning, the positivity effect, and the emotional well-being paradox of late adulthood.

Ego Integrity vs. Despair (Erikson)

Erikson's eighth and final psychosocial stage. Ego integrity involves looking back on one's life and accepting it as coherent and meaningful — not without regret, but with a sense that one's existence has been authentically one's own. Despair results from the inability to accept the life lived and the awareness that time has run out. Integrity is associated with wisdom, emotional acceptance, and a sense of contributing to something beyond the individual self.

Social Network Pruning

The age-related reduction in social network size, accelerating in late adulthood, in which peripheral acquaintances are allowed to lapse while close relationships are actively maintained. Carstensen's SST explains this as a deliberate, adaptive strategy rather than social withdrawal: as the time horizon shortens, the opportunity cost of investing in peripheral relationships rises and the value of deepening close ones increases. Relationship quality and satisfaction typically remain high despite smaller network size.

Positivity Effect

The tendency of older adults to attend to and remember positive stimuli preferentially over negative ones — a reversal of the negativity bias observed in younger adults. Predicted by SST: when emotional regulation is the primary goal, attention is directed toward emotionally rewarding content. The effect is reduced when attention is required for the task (cognitive demand restores attention to negative stimuli), suggesting it is driven by motivated attentional processes rather than reduced capacity to process negative information.

Bereavement and Loss

Late adulthood involves the accumulation of losses — of the spouse, friends, siblings, and contemporaries — that cumulatively reshape the social world. Conjugal bereavement (loss of a spouse) is associated with elevated mortality risk (the 'widowhood effect'), depression, and social isolation, particularly for men. However, resilience is the modal response to bereavement: most bereaved older adults return to baseline psychological functioning within one to two years, with a minority showing prolonged grief disorder.

Successful Ageing

Rowe and Kahn's (1997) influential model defines successful ageing along three dimensions: low probability of disease and disease-related disability, high cognitive and physical functional capacity, and active engagement with life (productive activity and social relations). Criticised for setting an unrealistically narrow standard that excludes most older adults, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Subjective conceptions of successful ageing emphasise psychological well-being, acceptance, and meaning over objective functional criteria.