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Why is this octogenarian so preoccupied with even very small financial matters and such a penny-pincher when there seems to be no need for being so? A “fancy” interpretation might dwell on biological changes with age and the hypothetical recrudescence of anal-retentive features.
Most gerontologists, however, would probably go first with a simpler interpretation: This person’s coming of age occurred during the Great Depression. He or she may have seen anxiety, confusion, anger, and deprivation on all sides. Perhaps he or she personally missed out on educational or career opportunities that never came around again.
The possible influence of the Great Depression on personality and adaptation in the later years of life is one example of the role of cohort effects.
What might be mistaken for the consequences of aging or the expression of a particular personality type might instead by more cogently understood as the response to sociohistorical circumstances encountered because of one’s membership in a particular birth cohort.
Several other examples were implied earlier in this chapter. For example, expectations and opportunities for women have varied significantly from generation to generation in the course of this century. These differences encompass the entire range of life activities, from careers to community service, from political involvement to sexuality.
In an intergenerational group meeting, one elderly widow observed that “I’ll tell you what my sexual anxiety was—seriously. It was not wanting to hurt my husband’s feelings by turning
him down, but not wanting to get pregnant again. . . . Oh, well, listen! We didn’t talk about those things like you do today, not even in the bedroom.
Now couples talk about sex and birth control like they talk about what to have for supper! . . . Yes, I think it’s better today, much better!” When a few minutes, the discussion turned to AIDS, the elderly widow somberly agreed that not all the changes were for the better.
Cohort effects are also strong and varied along the dimensions of race and ethnicity. Think, for example, of the differential expectations and opportunities experienced by elderly African-Americans in their youth— and compare this experience with the prospects that motivate and frustrate their grandchildren today.
Specific historical events can also have differential impacts on people of varying cohorts. For example, the sudden rise in discrimination against Japanese-Americans during World War II resulted in heightened stress and, for some, significant loss. This experience took markedly different forms, however, for young and old.
Senior adults had to cope with such feelings as surprise, anger, and disappointment that they
would be treated as though disloyal to America, and the fear that all they had worked for over the years was now in jeopardy. However, they also had the resources of experience and maturity to call upon in coping with this crisis.
By contrast, children also felt the sting of discrimination and the sense of stress and anxiety that enveloped their families—but they did not have a fully developed perspective within which to contain and cope with this situation.
Therapists interested in ameliorating the anxiety of elderly JapaneseAmericans would have had markedly different situations to deal with in the mid-1940s as compared with today: a person whose well-established life pattern had been disrupted and assailed by his or her host society, or a person who carries forward from childhood the memories of discrimination, trauma, and distrust.
It would be simplistic to proceed on the basis of a prototypical elderly person who has a particular kind of anxiety and a particular way of dealing with this anxiety.
Gender, race, ethnicity, health, personality, and cohort membership all contribute to who this particular person is and how he or she attempts to cope with anxiety in the later years of life. Furthermore, these influences are interactive at all points in the total life course. Mrs. P., for example, cannot be understood adequately in terms of her 87 years.
We must take into account the role of the female as expected within first generation Polish-American culture and modified to some extent over the decades, a competitive personality that helped her to advance her own claims within a large family network, and a double-hip fracture that has severely restricted her mobility and independence in her old multilevel home.
Moreover, we still would be ignorant of some of the most powerful influences and resources in her life if we did not take into account the ethnic neighborhood in which she resides—and the social and economic pressures that this traditional conclave is now facing itself.
As it happened with Mrs. P., her intensified anxiety centered on an impending marriage that, to her way of thinking, would leave her in a socially isolated and less empowered position. She could cope with
this and she could cope with that—but not with the threat of losing power within the family and neighborhood social structure.
