Young persons' attitudes toward aging

Perception of Old Age in German Undergraduate Dental Students-A Comparison of Two Cohorts 10 Years Apart

Previous studies revealed that students’ willingness to provide dental services for older patients is mainly influenced by their individual perception of elders rather than their knowledge about old age. The aim of this study was to estimate students’ perception of old and young age as well as their hopes and fears associated with old age and to compare two cohorts that participated in the study 10 years apart. Data were obtained from a questionnaire completed by two cohorts of undergraduate dental students from 2006 to 2008 (T1, n = 207) and 2016 to 2018 (T2, n = 135). Participants were asked to define the ages that they consider a man or woman to be old and young. Moreover, they had to specify their fears and hopes associated with old age. Reported thresholds for old age differed significantly between T1 and T2. In contrast to T1 students, T2 students defined a person to be old at a higher age and barely differentiated between the old ages of men and women. Furthermore, T2 students presented more fears related to aging than T1 students, e.g., psychological problems or loss of independence. The perception of age appears to be a multifactorial process and significantly changed between students of T1 and T2. Fears of dental students regarding old age should be addressed in, e.g., gerodontological curricula, to foster positive experiences in interaction with older people and highlight the important and rewarding aspects of gerodontology.

Age, Gender, And Occupational Label: A Test of Social Role Theory

Two studies tested the social role theory (Eagly, 1987) prediction that role information would override the age-related agency stereotype. Although results of Study 1 showed that employed people were viewed similarly in agency regardless of target age, interpretation was limited because employed targets were most often imagined to be male and young homemaker targets were most often imagined to be female. To control for this, target gender was added as an independent variable in Study 2. As expected, agency and communion ratings of employed targets and targets who cared for a home did not differ by target age, but agency ratings of average targets were higher for 35-year-old than for 70-year-old targets. Communion ratings for average targets did not differ by target age. Target gender effects on the agency measure replicated Eagly and Steffen's (1984, 1988) results. The importance of context to understanding stereotypes of the elderly is illustrated.

Change and Persistence of Personal Identities after the Transition to Retirement

This study addresses the question of how retired people's self-image differs from that of working people, and what factors predict people's self-definition as professionals or retirees. Seven hundred ninety-two Swiss persons aged 58–70 (386 men, 406 women; 349 not retired, 443 retired) were asked to rate the importance of different self-description domains (such as profession, family-roles, personal values, etc.). Results indicated that the profession domain remains important for self-description even after retirement, to the extent that retirement status does not predict the importance of the professional identity at all. Rather, consistent with social identity theory, the importance of the profession for self-description is best predicted by the status of the (former or current) job. The importance of the retirement status for self-definition is predicted best by a positive attitude toward aging. In general, retired respondents rated more domains of self-description as important than did not-yet-retired respondents, and no domain was less important after retirement. In other words, identity diversity was higher for the retired than for the not-yet-retired persons. In addition, high identity diversity correlated with a high satisfaction across different life domains.