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STUDIES AND RESEARCHES ON SELF-PERSONALITY
A glance at how this large national sample of respondents answered other life-satisfaction questions on the Harris poll shows that there are plenty of unhappy older people, just as there are plenty of unhappy people of any age. But getting older does seem to make us less troubled in at least one important way. Emotional problems characterized by anxiety - phobias, disabling fears - are relatively common among children and young adults, but epidemiological (population) surveys show that they are not nearly as prevalent among middle-aged and older adults.
It may be that the most anxious people tend to die off relatively young - for instance, succumbing to stress-induced middle-age heart attacks. People who survive to old age may be emotionally (not just physically) tougher. Or Jung may be right: as we get older we really do mellow. Experience with life\'s punches may help us react more philosophically, particularly when a major crisis occurs.
The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, sponsored by the National Institute on Aging is bearing out Jung\'s point of view. The psychologists in the multidisciplinary NIA research team have been examining how volunteers of different ages react to stressful events. They find that most people of any age do respond in a mature way to life\'s blows, using strategies such as acting rationally, thinking positively, or crying on a close friend\'s shoulder to help them cope as constructively as possible. But mature reactions are most common in middle-aged and older people. The volunteers aged twenty to forty-nine were more likely to handle setbacks badly - flying into a rage, escaping into fantasy - than those aged fifty to eighty-nine.
And the Baltimore study is proving Freud wrong. As we grow older, we do not get more rigid. We are just as flexible as ever in dealing with life\'s changing demands. When they analyzed the ways volunteers dealt with stress as they returned over the years, the psychologists found: \"Older men and women do not rigidly maintain habits of coping that . . . have outlived their usefulness. Instead, as stresses change so do coping responses. Or - put more bluntly - we mature dogs are just as able as ever to learn new tricks.
Other research shows we may be particularly good at coping with life\'s most devastating traumas. The myth is that the elderly are least able to handle the worst. If anything, the opposite seems true. For instance, of any group, elderly women are least apt to develop severe physical or emotional problems after a spouse dies.
Being older also seems to make it easier to handle a life-threatening disease. When researchers at the University of Southern California studied 369 patients newly diagnosed with breast, colorectal, or lung cancer, they found that the age of the victim made the biggest psychological difference. Older people handled the shock of the news better; they were psychologically stronger in facing the disease.
Emotional hardiness is not confined to people with advantages like money or high social class. In a large study of stress among working-class elderly people in North Carolina, six months after having even several major setbacks, most people showed no serious psychological effects.
I am not suggesting that we should calmly shrug off traumatic events. After getting a diagnosis of cancer or losing a loved one, it may actually be healthy to feel bereft. Some psychologists believe that people who put a lid on their feelings and go on just as normal after such tragic events suffer worse pain later on. But there are also dangers in prescribing how anyone should behave. There may be no rigid \"best\" way to handle life\'s worst blows, because a variety of methods work. By \"work,\" I mean they help us to function and go on living, not necessarily that they ever totally erase our pain. And depending on who you are, you will handle problems in your own distinctive way.
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GENERAL HEALTH
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