In 1991 the first edition of this book was published, and this completely revised, expanded and updated fifth edition appears six years after the previous one. Stuart-Hamilton is a developmental psychologist: developmental psychology is frequently thought to concern only babies and children, and it is refreshing to find the concept carried through to its logical conclusions, with a chapter on bereavement and death (new in this edition).
Chapter 1 discusses what ageing is, in demographic and biological terms, including reviewing theories of how the body, and the senses, age. The next chapter comprehensively reviews the measurement of intellectual change in later life, including intelligence, reaction times, sensory changes and attention. Memory is covered in Chapter 3, language in Chapter 4, and the author is scrupulous in pointing out where results in these areas are confounded by factors such as intelligence, how declines in test performance are only relative, and how individuals naturally differ considerably. Chapter 5 deals with personality and lifestyle, discussing, for example, how certain traits appear to stay constant throughout life, while others change; and some of the ‘Big Five’ personality variables (Costa and McCrae Reference Costa, McCrae, Baltes and Brim1980) correlate with other measures relating to age, such as mild cognitive impairments and overall life expectancy. It covers attitudes to ageing held by various population groups, including some relevant to older people such as doctors and nurses; and it also mentions cultural and ethnic group influences on such attitudes. In Chapter 6 mental health in later life is covered, including dementia, depression, anxiety and substance (ab)use. It further shows how stereotypes of older people can hinder the proper diagnosis of mental health problems.
For me, the most important chapter in the book is Chapter 7, ‘Problems in Measuring the Psychological Status of Older People’. This is a critical essay pointing out the extreme difficulty of assessing the effects of ageing on psychological variables, confounded as they are by aspects of lifetime experience, intelligence and other factors. Throughout the book, the author carefully identifies the doubts that surround many research findings due to aspects of the methodology, including sampling biases. The almost universal use, in ageing research, of students as the younger comparator group overlooks the fact that students are atypical of the younger population: and many researchers are young people, whose research designs and interpretations may be coloured by their own youthful points of view. Most tests of intellectual skills were originally set up for testing young adults, and ‘intellectual ageing is being set up as a measure of how far older people have fallen from the ideal standard set by younger adults’ (p. 266).
Chapter 8, ‘Death, Dying and Bereavement’, covers psychological aspects of the final stages of life. Lastly, Chapter 9 looks at what ageing might be like in an ever-more technologically driven society, and suggests that design of such technology, if oriented towards older people, will succeed in including everybody. The book includes useful appendices and a glossary of technical terms used.
One criticism I have is that most of the time, research findings are reported comparing ‘older’ with ‘younger’ people, without specifying the ages of the research participants involved. In so doing, the author, unintentionally I am sure, falls into the trap well described by Bytheway (Reference Bytheway2005), writing about ageism and age categorisation: the tendency of researchers to lump older people into categories such as ‘60 and over’ or ‘75+’, which imply the homogeneity of the people so categorised. Yet, when specific age bands are mentioned (e.g. p. 148), it is clear that the ‘younger old’ may differ from the ‘older old’. An area neglected by Stuart-Hamilton is, I feel, the social psychology of ageing. For example, the effects of ageist behaviour and stereotyping are pernicious and it is possible that ‘stereotype threat’ has affected older people's performance in many areas of psychological research (e.g. Chasteen et al. Reference Chasteen, Bhattacharyya, Horhota, Tam and Hasher2005).
The book is extremely well written throughout, and the author succeeds in communicating sometimes turgid and/or complex research findings in an approachable and readable way. Each chapter is well summarised, and further reading is suggested. As such it will be a valuable text for all, including experienced gerontologists, interested in the psychological aspects of ageing.
