Is Ammachi in Denial?

 Ammachi swears by her health and says she is still as capable of doing things as she was in her 30s, but is that so, or is she in denial? She says she remembers all her memories and can still do the same activities as when she was 20, but her behavior says otherwise.

Ammachi, or in psychological terms, someone in their late adulthood stage, goes through numerous changes, be it physical, cognitive, social, or emotional. The aging process is as inevitable as the sun rising; it brings with itself some ups and downs that some take head-on, but for others, it can be hard to deal with. However, understanding and accepting these changes is the first step in navigating the aging process.

Up. Image courtesy of Pixar

Firstly, focusing on physical development during late adulthood, theory and research say that changes happen in two ways: primary aging and secondary aging (Busse, 1969). Primary aging is the universal aging that occurs due to genetics in people as they grow old. Secondary aging is the one that happens due to illnesses, health practices, etc. but is not due to the increase in age. If you look at your ammachi, you might have noticed that she might have grown shorter as you grew taller. Is that allowed, though? You can even see her hair growing whiter and her skin getting loose. These are all part of primary aging; getting shorter and thinner generally happens due to osteoporosis or thinning of bones (Hoyer & Roodin, 2009) and muscle loss (Evans, 2010), respectively.

Significant changes occur if we have to talk about senses: vision, hearing, smell, and taste. The ammachi I spoke to said she did not wear glasses before, but now that she is old, she has difficulty seeing far-away things. With aging, the lens, cornea, and optic nerve fail to perform their best (Owsley C., 2011). Due to this, vision takes a huge toll, and even tolerance to glare diminishes. As if things were not getting worse, hearing too gets affected. Due to their cochlea’s degeneration, it gets hard for them to hear, especially at higher frequencies. Ammachi says her smell and taste have not been affected, but research says it should be declining now. Is it that she is lucky, or is she in denial? Focusing on her circulatory system, she says she has hypertension, which might be linked to obesity, stiffening of blood vessels, stress, or lack of exercise (Shizukuda et al., 2010).

Physical decline is one of the most common declines seen in late adulthood. When asked to perform some tasks from the Rikli and Jones Senior Citizen Test, a widely used assessment tool for measuring physical fitness in older adults, like the Chair sit and reach test and eight foot up and go test, it was observed that Ammachi could not perform well, even though she thought otherwise. This indicates that she might be experiencing some physical decline, a common occurrence in late adulthood.

One way to explain these declines could be Dr. August Wiesmann’s wear and tear theory of aging in 1882. This theory suggests that aging results from a gradual deterioration of the cells and tissues of the body via wear and tear, oxidative stress, exposure to radiation, toxins, or other deteriorative processes. It implies that living organisms wear out over time with repeated use and increased stress on the body. Another theory, the genetic programming theory of aging, provides a different perspective. It describes aging as resulting from genetic encoding within an individual’s DNA, whereby one is born with a predetermined tendency toward a developmental timetable. Also called planned obsolescence theory suggests that our bodies are programmed to age and deteriorate over time.

It is not all downhill; there are also ups with these downs, which can be observed in cognitive changes. Cognitive changes influence intellectual functioning, memory, processing speeds, attention, decision-making, language, mental health, wisdom, etc. While some aspects of cognition decline, some are maintained, and some even improve.

There are various theories to explain cognitive changes; one explains the fluid and crystallized intelligence and how that affects cognition (Baltes & Schaie, 1974; Schaie, 1993; Deary, 2014); one explains the cognitive mechanics and pragmatics that show the multidimensionality of cognition (Baltes et al., 2006).

You might have noticed that Ammachi needed help understanding (process) the information as quickly as she could when you were younger; aging plays a significant role in that. Attention is another aspect that is significantly affected by age. While observing memory, it can be seen that Ammachis might not remember the where and when of her 14th birthday but can very well remember her best friends from school and their birth dates. On conduction of levels of processing task with Ammachi, it was seen that she was able to recognize words that were semantically questioned rather than phonetically and sensory. This happens because episodic memory declines much more than semantic memory in late adulthood (Yoon et al., 2009). Decision-making, language, and wisdom are where things start looking up for older people. They tend to stay the same and sometimes improve (Healey & Hasher, 2009).

When talking about cognitive changes, mental health is another crucial aspect. There are numerous mental health issues that ammachis could go through. Depression, Alzheimer’s Disease, Dementia, Parkinsons, etc. These issues manifest in late adulthood due to numerous age-related problems that need to be identified as soon as possible and dealt with.

Even though there are significant declines in late adulthood, various studies show that physical activity and other tools can be utilized to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Research on rodents, epidemiological studies, and trials have shown that physical activity can enhance brain function and cognitive abilities in older adults and reduce the risk of developing dementia. This offers a ray of hope, suggesting that it’s never too late to start incorporating physical activity into your routine to maintain cognitive abilities. I hope Ammachi can implement some changes and find a way out of her denial.

References

Feldman, R. S. (2019). Development Across the Life Span. http://books.google.ie/books?id=l9k-uQEACAAJ&dq=development+across+life+span,+robert+s+feldman&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Owsley C. (2011). Aging and vision. Vision Research, 51(13), 1610–1622. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2010.10.020

Myers, D. G., & Twenge, J. M. (2021). Social Psychology.

“Wear and Tear Theory of Aging” by Zahra Sattaur, Lisa K. Lashley et al. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cps_facbooks/732/