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Older adults were described as a population who are physically challenged, perceptually degraded, and cognitively impaired in previous sections. However, many older adults actually are in work even-aged above 65 (as shown in Fig.1), plus, most chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies are aged around 60 years old (Salthouse, 2012), which indicated that older adults did well in daily functioning rather than screwed up. According to Hess (2014), the disconnection between empirical research and the actual daily life of older adults reflects the adaptive process of aging.
Namely, proceeding to different phases of life would result in strategy and motivation shifts to guide their selective behavior to determine “what they should engage or avoid?”. We illustrated here two classical lifespan developmental theories to interpret the motivation shifts of older adults and the related attitudinal behavioral changes.
Baltes and Baltes (1990) proposed the selection, optimization, and compensation model which argued that older adults selectively allocate their limited resources priorly considering their personal benefits and self-relevance. Thus, older adults would priorly consider what benefits the technology would bring to them when adopting new technology.
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For example, Melenhorst et al. (2006) found older adults explained their use and non-use of email from a benefit-related rather than a cost-related perspective. Specifically, older adults would use the email due to their perception of its benefit rather than view it as costless, and they would not use it due to their absent perception of its benefit rather than view it as highly-costs.
According to the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST) (Carstensen et al., 1999), the perception of lifetime left can strongly predict life motivation, which presumed life goals can be divided into two categories: goals related to the acquisition of knowledge and those related to the regulation of emotion.
From the longitudinal perspective, across one's life, when the lifespan is expanded, people more likely pursue knowledge-seeking goals prior to emotional ones (e.g., a college student may be willing to take lessons from the instructor she dislikes, Fung et al., 1999). By contrast, when lifespan is limited, the priority shifted into emotional goals (e.g., an older adult may not want to talk with a knowledgeable but unfriendly neighbor, Fung et al., 1999). For older adults, with the reduction of lifespan, their motivation gradually switched into emotion regulation concerned social contacts, simultaneously, the change influences the way of considering a social relationship, attention, as well as memory.
There is a stereotype that aging always accompanied by sadness and loss due to mental and physical degradation; however, most of older adults conversely showed a sense of emotional satisfaction (Carstensen et al., 2011). Carstensen and her colleagues (2000, 2011) followed 10 years of totally 553 participants with various backgrounds aged range from 18 to 94 years and found that older adults showed optimally emotional stability and experienced fewer kinds of negative emotions, compared to younger adults, and this peaceful and calm state maintained from early old age to approximately 70-80 years old. The “paradox” (Kunzmann et al., 2000) could be well explained by older adults’ motivation of emotional regulation mentioned above which unconsciously influenced the way older adults interacted with surrounding environments, namely, the positivity effect.
The positivity effect embeds in the information processing of older adults, with the attentional and memory bias of information with positive affect. Specifically, older adults spotted the dot that followed the happy face faster than that followed the neutral face, likewise, they spotted the dot that followed the neutral face faster than that followed the angry face (Mather & Carstensen, 2003), which indicated that older adults were automatically attracted by the happy face and avoided the angry faces (Mather & Carstensen, 2005). Another identical finding suggested that older adults invested the happy face with the highest number of fixations, whereas younger adults more concentrated on fear expression (Isaacowitz, Wadlinger, Goren, & Wilson, 2006a & 2006b). In addition, after reading a novel, older adults recalled more affective content or feelings brought by the content compared to the detailed plot information of the novel (Carstensen & Turk-Charles, 1994). In relation to the recollection of past experiences, older adults effortlessly recalled good decisions they made instead of bad memory (Mather & Johnson, 2000). Compared to the negative picture which depicted sights of the graveyard, older adults remembered more details about the positive picture portrayed the family harmony (Charles et al., 2003).
Age-related Differences in Motivation. (2020, Sep 27). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/age-related-differences-in-motivation-essay
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