Socioemotional Functioning in Adulthood and Old Age

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While discussions about aging societies center mostly around concerns, the growing elderly population also represents a source of social and human capital that has only recently become available and is currently underutilized. There has been relatively little consideration of the positive contributions older people can make to societies and even less exploration of ways to establish new norms and generate new social roles that benefit older people and the broader societies in which they live. The proposed research aims to characterize contributions that older people make to families and neighborhoods and explore ways to increase such contributions. The overarching objective is to identify and illuminate conditions that foster win-win outcomes in which older people contribute to the well-being of others in ways that simultaneously confer benefits to their own health and well-being. The research is guided conceptually by socioemotional selectivity theory, which maintains that changing time horizons result in systematic age differences in motivation and emotion such that aging is associated with increasingly greater priority placed on emotionally meaningful experiences. In addition to continued efforts to refine measures and replicate findings throughout the five-year grant period, three specific aims will be pursued. The first tests the hypothesis that grandparents confer protective effects on grandchildren which are predicted by emotional characteristics and investment of grandparents. We also hypothesize that these effects are most pronounced when grandchildren live in high-risk households. The second aim considers the potential cognitive costs of structuring social worlds around well-known and emotionally close others and strives to characterize social environments that offer both cognitive stimulation and emotional satisfaction. The third aim explores the effects of older community residents on neighborhood well-being. We hypothesize that a higher density of older people in a neighborhood is associated with lower school absenteeism in children and lower crime rates as well as greater social cohesion. With social network analysis we will examine the influence of highly engaged older neighbors on the strength of social cohesion at the community level. RELEVANCE (See instructions): Aging presents significant challenges for individuals and societies in the 21st century. Most of the anticipated burden, however, is predicated on social and cultural norms that fail to encourage active participation of older adults in workplaces, families, and communities. The overarching objective is to identify and illuminate conditions that foster win-win outcomes in which older people contribute to the well- being of others in ways that simultaneously confer benefits to their own health and well-being.