Young Adults Have Stronger, More

Young adults have stronger, more flexible and enduring bodies that can perceive more sharply and process more information for quicker response even in a complicated environment than senior adults. These young ones are also more easily won by external rewards and more conscious about their looks and behavior in public than older people. But they fare equally in performing tasks requiring moral reasoning. Their sense of the future and the extent of that future also depends on how satisfied they are with their past and present lives, not on how old they are or how long they have lived.

Socio-cultural beliefs, experience and observation assume that young adults aged 16-19 will be vastly different from senior adults aged 60 or more in body, mind and perceptions. This appears to be the basis of the existence of ageism in current-day society. Piaget's theory on development stages assigned certain achievements to particular stages and believed that these achievements would be constant and stable by the time the individual became old. Most people have been inclined to accept his view and evolved a common attitude that young people in this age bracket would be physically, mentally and emotionally more vibrant and happier than senior people. The physical, perceptual, cognitive and affective changes between these age ranges will be pronounced and unchangeable by the time one reaches old age. It also implied that old age is quite often a disadvantage that society wants to avoid or delay for as long as possible.

Findings

Business negotiations require credibility and proper carriage before customers. Customers choose successful people to negotiate with, people with a sense of self and certain qualities that come only with maturity (Griffin 1998). California Image Advisors founder and president, Dianna Pfaff-Martin stressed that successful people are deliberate, logical and direct in discussing the difference their product or service would make and prepare ahead of time. This is not the impression often made by young people who clench their hands, sitting too straight and with both feet on the floor, throwing arms or speaking high-pitched (Griffin). In business, age is a disadvantage. Investors will trust an older person to negotiate with and trust their money in. Young starters may try to improve their image in order to be successful, but they cannot fake everything. Older people or seniors have the edge because of their experience and wisdom gathered through age.

Considerable evidence shows that the central nervous system slows down with increasing age (Cerella 1985 and Salthouse 1985 as qtd in Parr 1995). A study conducted with 10 young adults and 10 older adults, aged 17 to 85 and from well-educated community setting, tended to illustrate this with the use of the letter matching method. It confirmed earlier findings that older adults generally perform more poorly than young adults in letter matching. Older adults demonstrated this by longer latency response and more errors. The "automatic" matching processes of non-generation and rapid visual generation involved in the method enable young adults to perform better while older adults perform more slowly. Regeneration is a factor in the method, which is more difficult for senior individuals. Older persons are also more sensitive to stronger noise levels that disturb the ability to judge. Furthermore, they tend to proceed more slowly in checking results more carefully. As a consequence, they make more errors in answering (Parr). Results of the study pointed to different processing mechanisms sensitive to increasing age, which accounted for the delay of performance in older adults. These also suggested that older people found greater difficulty in articulating the task and in regenerating or retrieving stimuli and/or in maintaining the stimuli in short-term visual memory. Older adults tended to exhibit greater deliberateness than rapid acuity, which younger adults would often show.

Differences between young adults and senior people are in the sharpness of the senses, such as hearing. One common complaint of the elderly is the difficulty in understanding speech in everyday situations (Schneider 1998). Some experts suggested that this difficulty was a consequence of hearing loss or some defect in the auditory process was responsible. Older people tend to prefer quiet and stable environments, while young people choose noisy, shaky and colorful settings. Experts looked into the possibility of age-related changes as affecting speech understanding or the temporal resolving power of the ear. Hence, a study was conducted with 10 young subjects and 10 senior subjects who were made to listen to pure tone at varying sound volumes. Results showed that the seniors found difficulty processing the changing or fluctuating sounds, characteristic of normal speech and which could explain their difficulty in understanding speech. This loss of temporal resolution could also explain why seniors themselves with good audiogram found difficulty understanding speech when noise increased and the speech went faster (Bergman 1980, Duquesnoy 1983, Plomp 1986, Stuart de Phillips 1996 as qtd in Schneider).

Another study assumed on age-related changes in understanding rapid speech as reflecting a fall in rapid information processing and interacting with linguistic redundancy in speech (Salant 2001). These findings were consistent with cognitive theories on aging, which point to an overall decline in the speed of mental processing with advancing age. This becomes evident when the senior individual is confronted with complex stimuli, which require several types or levels of processing (Craik and Byrd 1982 as qtd in Salant). It has also been observed in the case of time-compressed speech, which is raised through mechanical or digital techniques. Temporally distorted speech signals become difficult for older persons to perceive or intercept (Salant).

The study on aging, speech form and time compression offered three findings. First, age-related gaps in speech recognition are a consequence of the amount of presented spoken information and underscore the importance of linguistic cues for older people in understanding communication (Salant 2001). It also theorized that eliminating linguistic redundancy would respond better to the effects of aging in a person. Older people require clearer means of communication than merely verbal ones. Second, the changes in the sound of consonants reverberated by the environment to older people's hearing account for the difficulty in understanding spoken information more than the changes in the sound of the vowels and pauses. These changes, in turn, reduce the overall speed by which their hearing intercept the spoken message. This does not commonly occur in young adults. It implied that speaking more slowly enabled older listeners to grasp the spoken message more clearly and accurately. Theoretically, it also suggested that the difficulty was a consequence of the limited processing capacity in older people for short consonant cues more than the decrease in speed of information processing. The spoken message could be more intelligible to older listeners if the consonants were pronounced longer than the vowels when delivered rapidly. Lastly, decreased contextual information would worsen the disadvantages incurred by older listeners with time-compressed speech. Findings confirmed that older listeners could process hearing resources, occurring with increased demand for reduced acoustic information in time-compressed spoken information and linguistic cues in the current world of young listeners and speakers (Salant).

Younger and older people in these brackets also differ in forming contingency judgment and the role played by short-term memory in forming such judgments (Parr 1998). These judgments evaluated the relationship of events in the environment, whether between actions and outcomes or independent of individual behavior. This capability was vital in the cognitive task of grasping and understanding causes and effects in the environment, such as the water cycle and the disease process and prognosis (Alloy and Tabachnik 1984 as qtd in Parr). Existing evidence held that contingency judgment was less accurate in older adults who would be more inclined towards illusory correlation and tended to have greater difficulty remembering the frequency of event combinations. Timed online processing and storage tests, however, showed that young individuals retained, recalled and reasoned better than older individuals. The suggested source of age-related differences consisted of storage capacity, processing efficiency and coordination effectiveness. It maintained that processing speed was crucial to age-related differences in short-term memory performance and could function as a suitable basis for understanding changes that go with aging (Parr).

Subjects of the research were 25 young people between 18 and 28 and 25 65-75-year-olds who were asked to respond, using the keyboard of microcomputers (Parr 1998). Findings showed that judgment deteriorated with increasing age, consistent with earlier findings (Salthouse 1987 and 1994 as qtd in Parr), which held that operational capacity decreased with increasing age, although structural capacity remained relatively stable. Other perspectives attempted to explain this to mean that aging people became less able to sustain stimuli in an initial state of activation, although reduced efficiency was negligible and occurred only under extreme pressure. Findings of the study agreed with the associative view of contingency judgment, which assumed that sustenance of primary activation deteriorated with age (Parr).

Reward is another factor in influencing the behavior of people in these age brackets. This concept gains importance because of the observation that the outcomes of one's behavior determine or direct his or her future actions (Tripp 1999). Reward motivates a particular action and discourages another and this observation appears to be applicable across all ages. Growing evidence, however, reveals that older adults could be less influenced by the consequences of their behavior than younger ones and suggests that reward has greater appeal to younger adults than to older adults. Related literature supported the view that older adults were less susceptible to motivation, such as financial gain, and that simple payoffs failed to elicit response from them (Sanford 1978 as qtd in Tripp). While young adults would be influenced by financial or social rewards, older people would prefer the acquisition of skill or learning.

The study was based on the responses of 31 younger adults and 31 older adults (Tripp 1999). The findings indicated that the reduced interest in reward was a direct consequence of the aging process (McCarthy 1991 as qtd in Tripp), and age-related changes in dopaminergic function could explain it. The neurotransmitter dopamine is believed to critically affect incentive learning and reinforce behavior. There was also some evidence that dopaminergic function decreased with age and the reduced sensitiveness to reward could directly result. Rewards and other incentives have always been believed to alter or influence performance. If sensitiveness to the frequency of reward decreases with increasing age, age-related performance could occur (Tripp).

According to this research, younger people were more drawn by external rewards than senior people (Tripp 1999). If behavioral change is the goal, it suggested longer and more frequent rewards could be necessary. This difference in susceptibility to rewards could also indicate susceptibility to punishment, meaning that young adults could be more responsive to discouragement through punishment than older adults.

The aspect of moral reasoning tasks could be one more significant difference between young adults and seniors. Piaget theorized that the individual had attained the peak of moral development around 15 years old and assumed that that peak would remain stable throughout life (McDonald 1996). The assumption derived from the premise that older children and adolescents would perform Piaget's moral tasks correctly and that older people would do the same. But other studies have shown that older adults performed less in tasks like conservation, classification and seriation, and animism as they did in traditional tests of childhood reasoning. Findings of these studies suggested that such tasks proved unsuitable to older adults because the tasks looked too simple to them.

A test conducted to evaluate earlier findings used the responses of 110 subjects, including 44 teenagers with a mean age of 14.7 and 29 senior individuals with a mean age of 71.1 from the Midlands of England (McDonald 1996). They were asked to read a pamphlet, containing Piaget's 35 stories on moral reasoning, which came from his collection entitled "The Moral Judgment of the Child." The stories were categorized into lying, collective responsibility, stealing, punishment, immanent justice, equality and authority and justice between children. Those stories on carelessness, lying and stealing stressed on the motives and the outcomes of such acts; those on equality, authority and justice between children centered on attitudes toward authority; the stories on punishment delved into the types suitable for certain misdeeds; those on collective responsibility dealt with ethical choice of the group or the individual; and those on immanent justice were about the connection between a misfortune and wrong behavior. Responses were classified and represented a high or low level of moral reasoning as Piaget's assessment standard for children (McDonald).

Major findings illustrated that teen-agers had a lower moral reasoning level than the elderly and that moral reasoning did not tend to decline with increasing age (McDonald 1996). They deviated from what Piaget's informal method and theory, which predicted that people attaining a certain developmental level would never look back. They rejected Piaget's belief that aging people would always change the moral views held when younger and incapable or disinclined to change them in old age (McDonald). In everyday actual life, these findings may not be experienced by the objective observer, though.

Young adults and senior individuals seem to differ also in their time perspective. American culture is powerfully future-directed and optimistic and the young embody its ideals. Aging people, in general, tend to ruminate and look back at the pas (Fingerman 1995)t. Constant or frequent recollection of the past is not viewed as something static but as a shift that aging individuals take. They are inclined to be nostalgic. On the other hand, young adults vigorously dream of the future (Kastenbaum 1963 as qtd in Fingerman). Other studies found that older people thought about the past and the future as age increased, while still other studies showed they thought less of both as they aged. But all of these agreed that younger adults thought of the future longer and more vibrantly than did seniors.

Some other researchers discovered that older adults were not passive subjects to development but attempted to control and optimize their development (Fingerman 1995). One way was to develop a sense of the future they aimed at and which derived from what they perceived would be their future. In contrast, younger adults demonstrated a larger future time perspective, especially in adolescence, because of the new goals and expectations presented by oncoming adulthood. Subjects of this last study included 23 women and 15 men aged 20 and 37 and between 60 and 81 years, whites, well-educated and across citizens' action, religious and political groups. Findings showed that all responds concentrated on the near future, but they suggested that younger adults considered that near future within the context of a more distant future. Thinking about the future links with the events of a person's life, whether younger or senior, but the number of recent and positive past events seems to offer one a sense of control over and the continuity of future events. If these are satisfying, they create a greater tendency to look to a more distant future (Strumpf 1987 and Thomae 1981 as qtd in Fingerman) and that, therefore, the difference was not age-related but subjective.

A sense of control was also linked with life events and the tendency to think distantly in terms of time (Fingerman 1995). Inversely, the lack of control suppressed thoughts about the distant future. If one did not feel control over present or immediate future life events, it would be unlikely for him or her to think beyond the present or the immediate future. The age differences unearthed by this last study pointed more to a function of the stage of life than the actual length or longevity of a person. Some studies suggested that discontinuity in viewing later life occurred more in younger adults, but this study found that it was more frequent in older age, i.e, at retirement and the occurrence of physical health changes. Although both younger and older adults thought about distant future events frequently, findings of this particular study tied the frequency to the perceived pleasantness of satisfaction over one's current life events, rather than as an inherent developmental phenomenon or stage. That satisfaction determined or structured one's sense of time, how happy the young or old person has been, where he or she is going, how much control he or she has over where she or he is going or whether he or she wants to stop somewhere along the future (Fingerman)