Lighter as we go: Virtues, character strengths, and aging Book Whole

  


Authors: Greenstein, M.; Holland, J.
Title: Lighter as we go: Virtues, character strengths, and aging
Abstract: (from the jacket) The fears of aging have been one long cascading domino effect through the years: twenty-year-olds dread thirty; forty-year-olds fear fifty; sixty fears seventy, and so it goes. And there is something to worry about, though it isn't what you'd expect: research shows that having a bad attitude toward aging when we're young is associated with poorer health when we're older. These worries tend to peak in midlife; but in Lighter as We Go, Mindy Greenstein and Jimmie Holland show us that, contrary to common wisdom, our sense of well-being actually increases with our age-often even in the presence of illness or disability. On a joint venture between an eighty-five-year-old and a fifty-year-old, Greenstein and Holland explore positive psychology concepts of character strengths and virtues to unveil for the first time how and why, through the course of a lifetime, we learn who we are as we go. Drawing from the authors' own personal, intergenerational friendship, as well as a broad array of research from many different areas-including social psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, the humanities, psychiatry, and gerontology-Lighter as We Go introduces compassion, justice, community, and culture to help calm our cascading fears of aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
Keywords: aging; fear; well-being; positive psychology; attitudes toward aging; life span; virtue
ISBN: 978-0-19-936095-6
Publisher: Oxford University Press  
Publication Place: New York, NY
Date Published: 2015-01-01
Start Page: xi
Total Pages: 312
Language: English
ACCESSION: Book: 2014-22834-000
PROVIDER: Ovid Technologies
PROVIDER: psycinfo
DOI/URL:

http://ovidsp.ovid.com/ovidweb.cgi?T=JS&CSC=Y&NEWS=N&PAGE=fulltext&D=psyc11&AN=2014-22834-000
Notes: Source: PsycINFO