Social Psychological Correlates Of Occupational Conditio

National Institute Of Mental Health

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Abstract

This project investigates how socio-environmental conditions affect the psychological functioning of the elderly. It tests hypotheses about how, as one grows older, social-structurally determined environmental conditions such as complexity affect cognitive functioning, autonomous self-directed orientations and one's feelings about oneself and one's circumstances as well as mental and physical health. The data come from a follow-up survey of 707 respondents originally selected in 1964 as part of a nationally representative sample picked for an investigation of how occupational conditions affect psychological functioning. Findings in a paper published this year demonstrate that having substantively complex leisure time activities both affects and is affected by intellectual flexibility throughout the lifespan. Leisure time activities thus provide one of the mechanisms through which the environment affects the stability of intellectual functioning. In other analyses,we have investigated coping responses to health and financial problems. We have found that although the structure of emotional responses to these two types of stressor are similar, the effects of coping mechanisms differ: financially related coping mechanisms appear to affect overall distress, whereas some health-related coping mechanisms affect positive reactions specific to health status. In another set of analyses, we have shown that mastery, intellectual flexibility and self-confidence have reliable effects on health; in addition, health has a reciprocal effect on self-confidence. When we analyzed the long-term effects of these variables on disability-related difficulties we found that: 1) these variables affect level of disability over a 20-year period, and 2) the effects of these variables are more pronounced for disabilities involving gaps between and inability to fulfill the environmental demands of role functions than for functional limitations involving physical actions.