The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget is a most prolific renaissance man, publishing in biology, psychology, morality, language and philosophy. His lasting legacy has however been his identification and definition of stages in children’s thinking. Each stage is marked by shifts in our understanding of the world, as though our brain clicks into a different qualitative mode of processing information. We cannot learn a specific concept if our mind has not yet developed the capacity to understand it. A theory "so simple only a genius could have thought of it" according to Albert Einstein. The same concept applies to animals, in that their brain is “intelligent’ enough to represent the world they live in to enable them to survive and prosper. The same constrains exist among humans as they develop. Piaget termed this as Genetic Epistemology; how we learn about our environment.
The stages include sensorimotor (up to age 2) preoperational (2-7) operational stage (7-11) formal operational (11+). These stages move us from learning about the environment by touching and moving objects through it, to the development of language where we begin to apply symbolism and acquiring the concept of an ideal world. From this stage we start making rational judgments about concrete or observable phenomena using language to manipulate symbols. At the last stage we develop hypothetical and deductive reasoning. Increasingly more complex processes are incrementally added to the previous stages established in earlier stages of our development.
The model that we build in our mind is similar to how scientists organize the world in terms of classes of objects or schemas. Improving upon existing schemas through a process of logical assimilations or by changing the schema through accommodation this process aims for equilibrium--what Piaget terms “equilibration.” The beauty of this type of thinking is that intelligence is a reflection of an active process. Our brain is forming a model of the outside world that helps us understand and predict the world. And there are specific developmental stages in how we do this.
But Piaget stopped at young adulthood and he stopped at the cognitive. In a world of “hypercognitive snobbery”—where cognition is prized above other equally valuable aspects of being identified in 2006 by Stephen Post p.223—we assume that thinking is the ultimate, but cognition is not comprehensive enough to explain our world. We also have an emotional component in living, perhaps more important, but surely as important.
As with the current thinking at the turn of the 20th century, “old age” was seen as a decline from a peak of early adulthood. Piaget, following this prejudice, did not think that much happens after attaining formal operational stage. But he was wrong.
There is, at least, another stage of reasoning that we can also identify. The late Fredda Blanchard-Field with the Georgia Institute of technology promoted a stage of emotional development for older adults. What has developed into the socioemotional selectivity theory, this theory argues that we become more intelligent and mature about how we feel, where we select to remember positive experiences above negative ones. Pruning our social circles of friends or acquaintances and learning to let go of loss and disappointments are the external expression of this stage in thinking. But there is more. Our brain is wired so that the older we get the more that we focus and remember positive events while forgetting negative ones.
Psychologists Laura Carstensen—director of the Stanford Center on Longevity—and Charles Mather—with the University of California Santa Cruz—reported on neural mechanism that might be responsible for this selection of positive emotions. They identified cases where the amygdala—a small almond sized structure deep within the two sides of the brain—seems to be activated differently by younger versus older adults. Younger adults activate this structure more for negative images while older adults had higher activation for positive images.
But this did not explain why older adults remembered positive experiences better. It took a New Zealand psychologist Donna Addis and her colleagues to identify a possible mechanism. They asked young and older adults to view a series of photographs with positive and negative themes while recording their brain activity (fMRI). They found that in older adult brains, two regions that are linked to the processing of emotional content were strongly connected to regions that are linked to memory formation. Suggesting that older adults remember the good times well because the brain regions that process positive emotions also process memory.
Older adults experience an increase in positive thoughts and feelings, along with a decrease in negative emotions like anger and frustration. Living longer makes you remember positive emotions better because we are engineered that way—Genetic Epistemology. Like Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, this socioemotional stage involves a qualitative difference in how we process our environment. Reclaiming older adulthood as a unique stage in our development—rather than seeing older age simply as a decline—dictates that we assign this socioemotional selectivity stage on equal basis with the other stages of development. We cannot learn a specific concept if our mind has not yet developed the capacity to understand it. We need to mature to learn how to interpret emotional reality.
References.
Isaacowitz, DM & Blanchard-Fields, F. (2012). Linking Process and Outcome in the Study of Emotion and Aging. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(1), 3-17
Piaget, J. (1970). Genetic Epistemology. New York: Norton.
Piaget, J. (1977). Gruber, H.E.; Voneche, J.J. eds. The essential Piaget. New York: Basic Books.
Piaget, J. (1983). Piaget's theory. In P. Mussen (ed). Handbook of Child Psychology. 4th edition. Vol. 1. New York: Wiley.
Post, SG. (2006). Respectare: Moral respect for the lives of the deeply forgetful. In J. C. Hughes, S. J. Louw, & S. R. Sabat (Eds.), Dementia: Mind, meaning, and the person (pp. 223–234). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
© USA Copyrighted 2016 Mario D. Garrett
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