Socioemotional Functioning in Adulthood and Old Age

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.

Grant Number: 5R37AG008816-34
NIH Institute/Center: NIH
Principal Investigator: LAURA CARSTENSEN