Environmental Factors that Regulate Terminal Decline: Late-Life as a Natural Experiment

终身心理学的观点长期以来一直认为，个人生活在既为个人发展创造机会又限制个人发展的环境中（Baltes，1987）。许多观点，包括人类生态学（Bronfenbrenner，1979年）和环境老年学（Wahl，2001年），都强调生态因素对发展的重要性。对晚年的研究表明，即将到来的死亡为研究变化机制和环境因素如何运作提供了一个自然的极限测试范式。例如，环境顺从性的概念表明，随着个人能力的下降，环境特征变得越来越重要（Lawton，1990）。累积的死亡相关负担和全身功能障碍（例如，身体或认知健康下降）强调个人的适应和调节系统;使其越来越难以保持健康和福祉。因此，晚年健康和幸福的下降提供了一个独特的机会，观察和理解环境调节发展的机制，我们的总体目标是确定环境的结构特征，这些特征是公共卫生，干预和预防的可塑性杠杆。工作的想法，晚年提供了一个特别有用的坩埚压力测试，其中差异突出浅浮雕，我们研究如何个人层面和区域层面的特征调节健康和福祉，面对即将到来的死亡。为此，我们结合联合收割机的心理和人口统计学观点，分析了来自三个高度工业化国家的大型代表性样本中现已死亡的参与者的多年纵向数据。这一为期三年的提案的具体目标是：（1）描述晚年衰退的人与人之间的差异，并确定近端个体因素的作用（例如，死亡年龄、性别、教育、收入、社会嵌入、感知控制、认知能力、个性等）。我们还使用模型，暗示残疾的积累作为晚年变化的主要力量，并研究残疾相关机制的时间和进展如何有助于下降的差异。(2)研究远端区域因素在调节个体晚年衰退进展中的作用。使用三个层次的增长模型，我们将确定哪些部分的晚年不平等占区域特征，并检查具体的经济，服务，社会和物理环境的特点，调节个人的适应和调节。(3)在多个具有国家代表性的数据集中复制环境风险监管机构的新模式。我们的建议的多国性质允许初步了解正在研究的现象的鲁棒性，并代表了理解其背景特异性的关键一步。

Lifespan psychological perspectives have long suggested that individuals live in contexts that create both opportunities for and constraints on individual development (Baltes, 1987). Many perspectives, including human ecology (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) and environmental gerontology (Wahl, 2001) highlight the importance of ecological factors for development. Studies of late-life suggest that impending death provides a natural testing-the-limits paradigm for studying mechanisms of change and how environmental factors operate. For example, the environmental docility notion suggests that contextual features become increasingly important as personal competencies decline (Lawton, 1990). Accumulating mortality-related burdens and systemic dysfunction (e.g., declining physical or cognitive health) stress the adaptive and regulatory systems of individuals; making it increasingly difficult to maintain health and well-being. Late-life declines in health and well-being thus offer a unique opportunity to observe and understand the mechanisms through which the environment regulates development.Our overarching objective is to identify the structural features of the environment that are malleable levers for public health, intervention, and prevention. Working from the idea that late-life provides a particularly useful crucible of stress tests where differences stand out in bas-relief, we examine how individual-level and regional-level characteristics regulate health and well-being in the face of impending death. To do so, we combine psychological and demographic perspectives in the analysis of multi-year longitudinal data obtained from now deceased participants in large, representative samples from three highly industrialized nations.The specific aims of this three-year proposal are:(1) To describe between-person differences in late-life decline and identify the role of proximal individual factors (e.g., age at death, gender, education, income, social embedding, perceived control, cognitive abilities, personality, etc.). We also use models that implicate the accumulation of disability as a major force underlying late-life change and examine how the timing and progression of disability-related mechanisms contribute to differences in decline.(2) To examine the role distal regional factors play in regulating the progression of individual late-life declines. Using three-level growth models, we will identify what portions of late-life inequalities are accounted for by regional characteristics, and examine the specific economic, service, social, and physical characteristics of the environment that regulate individual adaptation and regulation.(3) To replicate the emerging models of environmental risk regulators in multiple nationally representative data sets. The multi-nation nature of our proposal allows initial insights into the robustness of the phenomena under study and represents a key step towards understanding their context specificity.